Astraweb Review: Best Value Usenet Server

Astraweb is a Usenet access provider founded in 1998.
Searchtech Limited is the owner and operator, based in Singapore.

They provide premium Usenet services with server farms in the US and Europe.

Usenet Present vs History

Back in 2004, Usenet was nothing special to get excited about. Usenet provider Astraweb had a retention of about fourteen days and the speed wasn’t great either. Giganews was better with already offering 50 days of retention but also being pricy. In our opinion, this 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 slowly reaches more and more households. Because computers and internet connections became faster, the need for utilizing max download speeds 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. And EasyNews download speed is the highest you can get with your connection. Plus, it offers a free Usenet trial.

Have you wondered how much time you could save downloading mega content and 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 than 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 we have been watching the retention increase to 430+ days in 2009. Very impressive compared to fourteen days just five years before. Storage is cheap these days while still expanding, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see the retention growing continuously at this pace.

Comparing UseNext vs Usenet, it’s clear that UseNeXT is another provider with increased retention and speed. It provides a newsreader and a free VPN.

Value

After a serious long search for an unlimited and cheap Usenet provider, Astraweb caught our attention-

• Excellent Price – Best Value for Money Usenet
• Retention – 4000+ 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 – Server farms in the US and EU
• They run their own servers (no reselling) Total control over their own servers and farms.

In short, you get this with unlimited downloading for just $8 / month. A hard-to-beat offer for a service like this.

Who knows, the competition is getting stronger and there are many more providers than 5 years ago. So, this Astraweb review helps you to decide. But, also check out Eweka. Of all Eweka reviews, only with us, you’ll get a 27% lifetime discount.

If you combine this with Spotnet and a Usenet newsgroup search engine like binsearch.info or nzbindex.nl, you are all set. It’s the easiest and most efficient way to download. 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

The last few months of testing this service have been great. Our 200 Mbit/s cable connection is maxed out with just 5 connections. Compare Astraweb vs UsenetServer speed or vs Newshosting speed.

There are plenty of ways to connect 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 we 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, we sent them a message just to test them. Fortunately, the same day we got a nice reply.
Besides that, they also have a good online knowledge base that answers most questions. You can cancel your monthly subscription at any time without a problem.

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

Conclusion

It can be safely concluded that Astraweb currently offers the best price ($8) for the service you get. The speed, retention, and service support are great while watching the retention constantly increase.

We noticed that recently Astrawebs completion has been bad and we therefore no longer recommend them. Better compare Tweaknews vs Giganews instead.