Free Usenet News

Giganews has been providing Tier-1 NNTP service since the early 90's. They have always had good support and excellent service in my experience. I have been a member of their affiliate program from the beginning and have only received a couple of complaints in emails, out of the thousands of people that have purchased an account after visiting my site. Connecting to their servers from my home I get amazing active file download speeds using my testing software. It is not uncommon for active file transfers speeds to rival those of my personal news server sitting on the same rack as my test system.

Giganews Newsgroups

Unlimited

Days Retention
256-bit SSL

Diamond Plan

$17.49 first month
$34.99 per month
50 connections
VyprVPN
MIMO Browser

Platinum Plan

$24.99 per month
20 connections
sign up for a Free Trial

Giganews Usenet has long been at the cutting edge of the Tier-1 NNTP service providers.

they began upgrading their storage space on their servers a while back and currently have days of binary retention - the longest retention for any Tier-1 provider I have used

custom server software provides fast, redundant, distributed access to newsgroups.

articles are kept live on servers which means article downloads begin as soon as your request has been accepted. some providers archive articles older than a certain number of days which means downloading an older article first requires them to get it from the archive before your download begins.

their distributed server network has servers in North America, Europe and Asia allowing you to connect to servers closer to home reducing lag time

most (if not all) of their servers are on high-speed internet connections providing some of the fastest download speeds in the industry. Using their speed test, I get

Limited

20 connections
256-bit SSL

Silver Plan

$14.99 per month
50GB Transer
Days Retention

Bronze Plan

$9.99 per month
10GB Transer
Days Retention

Pearl Plan

$4.99 per month
5GB Transer
30 Days Retention

Giganews Usenet is always adding new services and features, most are available to all of their users. Many features are included for free to customers that purchase the Diamond account. Features added in just the past few years include:

A secure virtual private network client called VyprVPN that can be used to protect your privacy, not just while using Usenet, but also when browsing the internet and using your email client. VyprVPN is free to Diamond account users, or available for separate purchase from the developer, GoldenFrog. It is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone/iPad/iTouch and Android devices.

The Giganews Accelerator provides NNTP header compression to improve download speeds and provides 256-bit SSL encryption for all accounts. This provides what I call "poor man's privacy" for your account, ie. encryption prevents your ISP from seeing what groups and/or articles you are downloading. However, it is still possible for your ISP to know what sites and/or what services (HTTP/S, NNTP/S, etc) you are using from those sites, which they can use for various things including throttling your connection speeds.

A full usenet browser, the MIMO Browser, with built-in support for RAR and PAR files, threaded message reading and image viewing. It also has an integrated search feature, built-in Giganews Accelerator and has been optimized to deal with Giganews' large retention time and article count. MIMO is free to Diamond account users and, unlike most other usenet browsers on the market, this one is still under active development.

Giganews is currently working on a Personal Storage system to allow their users to take advantage of their very impressive distributed storage architecture to archive personal information online. Not a lot of details have been released yet, I have just received a couple of pre-release teasers in email and talked to a couple of people at the company which have mentioned it.