Giganews has long been at the cutting edge of the Tier-1 NNTP service providers. Their custom Usenet server software provides fast, redundant, distributed access to newsgroups, with server farms in the USA, Europe and Asia.

Giganews has always been at the forefront of new services for their customers, including VPN software, custom written Usenet client and now online storage.  Many of their services are included for free for their Diamond account holders, or they can be purchased separately from their developers at GoldenFrog.

Account Features

Free Trial – Giganews provides a 14-day free trial with up to 10GB of content downloaded from their newsgroup servers.

Tier-1 Provider – Giganews is one of the few Tier-1 providers still operating and selling accounts to the general public.  Some Tier-1 providers only work through resellers to avoid the hassles of billing customers and collecting payments.

Redundancy – Giganews has custom server software which provides fast, redundant, distributed access to Newsgroups.  This redundant network has data farms in the USA, Europe and Asia, and is part of the backbone for their online storage product as well.  Redundancy helps to ensure that in the event of the loss of servers or  possibly a data farm, you will still have access to articles from one of the backup machines that has a copy.

Retention – Giganews has Powered by Wordpress Plugins - Get the full version!
days of binary newsgroup articles. To my knowledge, this is the highest retention level in the Usenet server industry. In order to maintain their advantage, they are adding redundant storage as needed to increase their retention 1-day, every day.  The nice thing about them increasing their retention every day is that you no longer have to download an article immediately, if you come back for it next week, it will be there.

Unlimited Download Speeds – Giganews does not put any restrictions on your download speed or amount.  During my testing with the MIMO Browser I was able to easily max-out my internet connection, completing a download of a 4GB AVI file in about 40 minutes. People with a 100MBit/s connection should be able to complete the download in 7 or 8 minutes.

Giganews Accelerator – Giganews provider header compression for improved download speeds and 256-bit SSL encryption for all user accounts.  This application provides what I call “poor man’s privacy” for your account, ie. encyption prevents your ISP from seeing what groups you are downloading from, etc. However, it is still possible for yuor ISP to know what sites and/or what services (HTTP/S, NTTP/s, etc) you are using on those sites, which can be used for various things, including throttling or blocking your connection.

Premium Features

As I have already mentioned, Giganews has always provided the extras to their Diamond account holders.  These features are also available separately, for a price, but in my opinion, the additional monthly cost for the Diamond Bundle outways the individual costs for these features.

VyprVPN – Giganews, and their partner GoldenFrog, have released a Virtual Private Network package.  VyprVPN is free to Diamond account holders, if you were to purchase it standalone it would cost you a minimum of $14.99 per month. They have currently released it for Mac OS X, Windows XP or newer, Linux, iPhone, iPad and Android. They also have 8 different locations you can appear to be originating your connection from, with more planned in the future.

MIMO Browser – Giganews has made a nice, full-featured Usenet client available to their Diamond account holders for free, of course.  It has integrated search and binary handling, make it extremely easy to work with for people that are new to Usenet.  For those of us that had to learn to install all the pieces by hand, this is a welcome change; setup is simply a matter of installing and then typing your username and password.

Dump Truck – Don’t let the name fool you, Dump Truck is Golden Frogs’ Online storage solution and it is provided for free with all Giganews accounts. Dump Truck surprisingly fast & easy to work with on Windows, Mac OSx, iOS and Android devices.  Diamond users get 30GB of free storage on high-speed, distributed, redundant servers for anything they want to save including pictures, videos, music and even tax returns.  I am pleased to also mention that non-Diamond users have access to 5GB of free storage online as well. Just as a point of reference, 50GB of online storage costs only $9.99/month.

Summary

Giganews is THE premium Usenet Server provider; they may be a little more pricey but you receive a lot of extra value over other companies cheaper Newsgroup server accounts.  All of their accounts include free online storage, and their Diamond account includes VyprVPN for the ultimate in personal privacy and a free newsreader.  I have had an account with Giganews for at least 12 years and have never had a problem with their service. I often recommend them to people that have gotten tired of problems with their current Usenet server.

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