Astraweb

When Plusnot junks it binary service I'll be looking for a cheap news
service. Does anyone know if Astraweb are any good?
http://www.news.astraweb.com/
I'm not a heavy user - probably 10-20GB per month maximum.

For $10 you get 25GB which seems pretty good providing the retention and
completeness are OK?

Andy




Andy Watson

"Andy Watson" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:440dd526$0$3594$(E-Mail Removed)...
> When Plusnot junks it binary service I'll be looking for a cheap news
> service. Does anyone know if Astraweb are any good?
> http://www.news.astraweb.com/
> I'm not a heavy user - probably 10-20GB per month maximum.
>
> For $10 you get 25GB which seems pretty good providing the retention and
> completeness are OK?
>
> Andy
As I had a problem with port 119, I moved to astra and took up their $25 and
90Gb offer and cant complain, very fast and down time yet.

John

"Andy Watson" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:440dd526$0$3594$(E-Mail Removed)...
> When Plusnot junks it binary service I'll be looking for a cheap news
> service. Does anyone know if Astraweb are any good?
> http://www.news.astraweb.com/
> I'm not a heavy user - probably 10-20GB per month maximum.
>
> For $10 you get 25GB which seems pretty good providing the retention and
> completeness are OK?

bin with them for ages, very few problems, if any. They have US & European
servers you can use as well. Also on the PAYG service ;-)

P.

On Tue, 7 Mar 2006 18:47:01 -0000, Andy Watson
<(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

> When Plusnot junks it binary service I'll be looking for a cheap news
> service. Does anyone know if Astraweb are any good?
> http://www.news.astraweb.com/
> I'm not a heavy user - probably 10-20GB per month maximum.
>
> For $10 you get 25GB which seems pretty good providing the retention and
> completeness are OK?

I reckon that with my setup I should get a theotical download speed of
2,043,832.01 bps (inclusive of TCP/IP headers). On the occasions I've
made sure that nothing else was running during a header download from
Astraweb, it has only managed an average of 2,020,806.39 bps - so
there is certainly room for improvement on the speed front ;-)

I can't really comment on completion since I only use Astraweb as a
fill-in for (a) my ISP's news server (which is quick, but has poor
retention and completeness) and (b) Claranews (which is limited to 64
Kbps per connection and which has variable completion). My 'binary
news downloader' (which is a multi-component DIY system) doesn't make
it easy to figure out which article was downloaded from which server
(just because the client end requests an article from Astraweb, the
'proxy' component will still try to fetch it, by Message-ID, from my
ISP's server first - and you might be surprised how many times some
servers will return articles requested by M-ID, even though they never
appeared in the XOVER headers). Also my client (currently) only
reports overall completion across all servers (which is only very
rarely less than 100%) and it doesn't report completion rates for
individual servers (which are, after all, irrelvant). Astraweb
certainly contributes to the overall completion rate, but I can't say
what it's own completion is. FWIW, on my current usage (around 15GB
per month) my 25GB Astraweb 'block' will last for another 8 years.

Retention is certainly better than 'average', although nothing like
Giganews - but as with completeness, it doesn't bother me that much
since my downloader 'scans' XOVER headers for articles which match
pre-defined regex patterns and queues them for automatic download
(after a delay, to give them a chance to appear on my ISP's server,
and subject to an article with the same Subject line (there's a
'fuzzy' search alogithm which usually works) not having been download
previously). If you grab articles within a few hours of them
appearing, retention doesn't really matter that much.

Paying Astraweb for a 25GB block was money well-spent for me. You get
XOVER headers for 'free' (i.e. not deducted from your allowance), so
as a fill-in server it is very cost-efefctive :-)

Thanks for all replies - looks like I'll go for this one.

Andy

"Killa" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:440df2f9$0$1760$(E-Mail Removed)...
> On Tue, 7 Mar 2006 18:47:01 -0000, Andy Watson
> <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>
>> When Plusnot junks it binary service I'll be looking for a cheap news
>> service. Does anyone know if Astraweb are any good?
>> http://www.news.astraweb.com/
>> I'm not a heavy user - probably 10-20GB per month maximum.
>>
>> For $10 you get 25GB which seems pretty good providing the retention and
>> completeness are OK?
>
> I reckon that with my setup I should get a theotical download speed of
> 2,043,832.01 bps (inclusive of TCP/IP headers). On the occasions I've
> made sure that nothing else was running during a header download from
> Astraweb, it has only managed an average of 2,020,806.39 bps - so
> there is certainly room for improvement on the speed front ;-)
>
> I can't really comment on completion since I only use Astraweb as a
> fill-in for (a) my ISP's news server (which is quick, but has poor
> retention and completeness) and (b) Claranews (which is limited to 64
> Kbps per connection and which has variable completion). My 'binary
> news downloader' (which is a multi-component DIY system) doesn't make
> it easy to figure out which article was downloaded from which server
> (just because the client end requests an article from Astraweb, the
> 'proxy' component will still try to fetch it, by Message-ID, from my
> ISP's server first - and you might be surprised how many times some
> servers will return articles requested by M-ID, even though they never
> appeared in the XOVER headers). Also my client (currently) only
> reports overall completion across all servers (which is only very
> rarely less than 100%) and it doesn't report completion rates for
> individual servers (which are, after all, irrelvant). Astraweb
> certainly contributes to the overall completion rate, but I can't say
> what it's own completion is. FWIW, on my current usage (around 15GB
> per month) my 25GB Astraweb 'block' will last for another 8 years.
>
> Retention is certainly better than 'average', although nothing like
> Giganews - but as with completeness, it doesn't bother me that much
> since my downloader 'scans' XOVER headers for articles which match
> pre-defined regex patterns and queues them for automatic download
> (after a delay, to give them a chance to appear on my ISP's server,
> and subject to an article with the same Subject line (there's a
> 'fuzzy' search alogithm which usually works) not having been download
> previously). If you grab articles within a few hours of them
> appearing, retention doesn't really matter that much.
>
> Paying Astraweb for a 25GB block was money well-spent for me. You get
> XOVER headers for 'free' (i.e. not deducted from your allowance), so
> as a fill-in server it is very cost-efefctive :-)

On Tue, 07 Mar 2006 18:47:01 +0000, Andy Watson wrote:

> When Plusnot junks it binary service I'll be looking for a cheap news
> service. Does anyone know if Astraweb are any good?
> http://www.news.astraweb.com/
> I'm not a heavy user - probably 10-20GB per month maximum.
>
> For $10 you get 25GB which seems pretty good providing the retention and
> completeness are OK?

You might want to take a look at Easynews.com. It's $10 for 20GB, but
their web-based access is now so good that I've given up using NNTP for
most binaries.

They auto-repair rar-sets and decode any files under 2GB, so you
can just download video and start watching it immediately. They also have
an undocumented beta global search page (members.easynews.com/global)
where you can search using regular expressions - this is particularly
powerful since you can search on the filenames inside rar sets.

The only downside is that their binary NNTP retention can be as low as ten
days, although their web-file servers retain binaries for 39 days.

One word of warning though. From what I've heard plusnet discrimates
against news servers based on ip address and not just port number, it's
about the worst ISP around for NNTP. I felt sorry for Plusnet people even
when I was on Tiscali - and that's saying a lot.