Astraweb Review

Are you looking for a fast, reliable and cheap Usenet provider? Look no further! This is a genuine in-depth Astraweb review Usenet provider based on my actual experience. In this Astraweb review you will be learning the things that matter for an Usenet provider.

Usenet Present vs History

Back in 2004 Usenet was nothing special to get excited about. Usenet provider Astraweb had a retention of about 14 days and the speed wasn´t great either. Giganews was better with already offering 50 days of retention but also being pricey. In my opinion this all wasn´t really worth the price back then.

Today however, things are looking totally different. Broadband penetration is higher, cable and ADSL speeds increased while fiber is slowly reaching more and more households. While computers and internet connections became faster, the need for utilizing your max download speed became a natural fact. It´s not often that you can download with the maximum speed on peer to peer networks with the connection you pay good money for. Here’s where Usenet shines the best.
Have you wondered how much time you could save downloading DVD’s, High Definition content and other large files? Of course, it all depends on how fast your ISP’s connection is, but let’s say it’s 120 Mbit/s, a full DVD (4.7GB) should be downloaded in no more then 4 minutes. You can easily imagine what the result of a 200 Mbit/s connection will be.

Astraweb has greatly improved over the years and I have been watching the retention increase to 430+ days. Very impressive compared to 14 days just 5 years ago. They currently have one of the highest retentions, being the second best while Giganews is still leading by just 9 days, now being at 439 days, although the huge price difference can’t justify it. Storage is cheap these days while still expanding, so I wouldn’t be surprised seeing the retention continue to grow at this peace. Most likely it will be beyond 500 days in 2010 so keep in mind this Astraweb review is done in 2009.

Value

After having a serious look for a good and cheap Usenet provider, Astraweb caught my attention and here is why:

Excellent Price – Best Value for Money Usenet
Retention – Currently 430+ days and constantly increasing
Anonymity – No logs are kept, Anonymous Group Requests, Anonymous Posting
Uncensored News – No Discussions are Censored
SSL Enabled – Free SSL on all accounts
Completion – High number of peers. 99%+ completion
Speed – Multiple Links to High Quality Providers
Connections – 20 Simultaneous Connections
Posting Propagation – Excellent propagation of posts with many peers
US & EU Farms – Serverfarms in the US and EU
We Run Our OWN Servers – We do not resell. We have total control over our own servers and farms.

In short you get this with unlimited downloading for just $11 / month, ~7.5€. A hard to beat offer for a truly premium service like this. It’s no bullshit, they deliver what they advertise and my experience has been exactly like that. I have yet to see any other Usenet provider with this price and value. Who knows, the competition is getting stronger and there are many more providers then 5 years ago. So, this Astraweb review helps you to decide.

If you combine this with OpenFTD (Dutch) and a newsgroups search engine like binsearch.info or nzbindex.nl, you are all set. It’s the easiest and most efficient way to download about anything. It’s even possible to share your account with friends, although make sure you both don’t use it at the same time. For the best cross platform usenet client check SABnzbd.

* This is a SPECIAL offer. Available for a Limited time only through this link, it’s not on their main-page.

Speed/Connectivity

My personal experience in the last few months i use this service has been great. I get a constant 50 Mbit/s with just 5 connections, which is my current maximum cable (Ziggo) speed. If you have a connection like 120 Mbit/s you will easily reach that.
That’s about 10 Mbit/s for 1 connection, so 20 connections should be sufficient for 200 Mbit/s.

There are plenty of ways connecting to Astraweb servers, if your ISP throttles (traffic shaping) Usenet you can circumvent this by using different ports or SSL encryption.

Secure news servers (SSL 256 bit encryption) on ports 443 or 563
– ssl.astraweb.com
– ssl-eu.astraweb.com (European servers)
– ssl-us.astraweb.com (U.S. servers)

News servers on ports 119, 23, 1818 or 8080
– news.astraweb.com
– eu.news.astraweb.com (European servers)
– us.news.astraweb.com (U.S. servers)

Service Support

This is something that shouldn’t be ignored. Although I didn’t have any problems so far, it is always a good thing when you can count on service support.
For the sake of it, I send them a message just to test them out. Fortunately, the same day I got a nice reply.
Besides that they also have a good online knowledge-base which answers the most questions. You can cancel your monthly subscription at anytime without problem.

Payment methods: PayPal, iDeal, Visa, MasterCard, American Express, EuroCard, Discover, JCB, Diners Club and Debit Cards with the Visa/MasterCard Logo

Astraweb Review Conclusion

It can be safely concluded that Astraweb currently offers the best price ($11) for the service you get. The speed, retention and service support are great while watching the retention constantly increase. Therefore, I highly recommend this quality Usenet provider which doesn’t come short on anything.

So if you are tired of waiting and slow peer to peer downloads or just want to try something different, grab yourself an Astraweb Unlimited account, you won’t be disappointed.

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Astraweb Review Ratings

Speed: 4
Retention: 5
Support: 4
Value: 5
Overall: 4.5

This Astraweb review honestly deserves the rating by delivering their promises.