Giganews

The World's Best Usenet Provider

usenet

Mimo + Search now free with Diamond Account!

Back in July, we partnered with Golden Frog to deliver a new Usenet experience. We invited our most loyal Diamond members to an early access tech preview of Mimo Usenet Browser and Golden Frog Usenet Search. It was a simple choice to invite enthusiastic Giganews members to help develop the best Usenet browser and search platform.

Now, after 4 months in an exclusive tech preview, Mimo and Golden Frog Usenet Search are in beta and available for all Diamond Giganews members. With this release, Mimo comes with:

  • faster speeds
  • integrated thumbnail viewing
  • a search engine that dynamically indexes Giganews’ growing retention
  • auto unRAR and PAR handling
  • text, binary, and image filters

Participants reported bugs and requested features to improve Mimo and Golden Frog Usenet Search. From initial development to the technology preview and into beta, Golden Frog has added or fixed nearly 450 different features in response to member feedback.

One of the most requested features has been bandwidth throttling. Today, the new Mimo version has the option to control how much of your Internet connection is used by the browser. Member input also helped improve Mimo’s multi-language support, which currently covers six languages.

Golden Frog created Mimo and its integrated Usenet search to accommodate Giganews’ full and increasing retention. This is the world’s only cross-platform Usenet browser with integrated search indexing all 800+ days of Giganews’ retention. As Giganews’ retention continues growing, Mimo and Golden Frog Usenet Search are designed to dynamically keep up.

Mimo and Golden Frog Usenet search are in continuous active development. You can request features or report bugs by e-mailing Giganews Support or posting in giganews.mimo. We work closely with the Golden Frog development team to incorporate all member feedback. Expect continued improvements to Mimo’s resiliency, performance and ease of use.

Mimo and Golden Frog Usenet Search are free with all Giganews Diamond memberships today. Join the ongoing development. Download Mimo or become a Diamond member now.

Giganews first to 800 days retention — and not stopping!

Leading the Retention MarathonA little over a year and a half ago, we announced that we were going to be the first Usenet provider with a year’s retention. We got to that year, and then just kept going. We hit two years a little while ago, and still kept going. Today, we’ve hit 800 days of binary Usenet retention — and we’re still going.

800 days is just a number, though. None of that retention matters if we don’t also have good quality. For all 800 days, we have over 99% of the articles. On top of that, when we lose servers or disks, you don’t see random articles disappear temporarily. In fact, most customers don’t notice anything at all. Finally, our oldest, 800-day-old articles are stored on the same servers as our newest articles. If you want to fetch posts from 800 days ago, they’ll download just as fast as posts that arrived today.

Our software and systems were designed years ago to handle this level of retention. Today, we hit 800 days of retention, but we’re already ready for the next 800 days and beyond. Please enjoy the retention, and keep an eye out for new features we’ll be rolling out in the coming months.

7 Things Newer than the Oldest Giganews Article

Here at Giganews, we’re celebrating being the first and only Usenet provider to reach 2 years of high-quality binary retention.

What 2 years of binary retention gets you:

  • 2 years of images and files
  • 10 billion+ newsgroup articles
  • Over 4,000 TB of Usenet data

Think about the things that didn’t even exist when the oldest accessible binary article was posted to Giganews Usenet:

We’ve done a lot for the Giganews infrastructure in order to accommodate the amount of data storage necessary to continue growing our retention capacity. Learn more about retention and the Giganews infrastructure.

Check out Reasons to get VyprVPN for Browsing Security and Privacy

Our friends at Golden Frog have an interesting blog post discussing great reasons for browsing securely with VyprVPN personal VPN.

VyprVPN protects your online identity, keeps your location private, and restores your web browsing freedom by securing your Internet connection against third-party data interception.

You can use VyprVPN everywhere:

  • Public Wi-Fi
  • Private Networks
  • 3G and 4G cellular networks

VyprVPN works on many devices:

  • iPad
  • iPhone
  • Android
  • laptop
  • desktop

Diamond Giganews members get VyprVPN free. Check out the Golden Frog Blog to learn more about VyprVPN, or become a Diamond member for the best Usenet and VyprVPN.

Giganews Reaches 650 days of High Quality Binary Retention

Giganews keeps on going — today we reached 650 days of high-quality retention, and we’ll continue growing while still providing the best Usenet experience in the world. Other providers struggle in attempt to offer long-term retention because they don’t have the infrastructure and support team to handle the data, causing their systems to crash.

We are continuously focused on creating and maintaining an exceptional system that allows us to continue adding days of retention. It takes a lot of work and the right people — we have the space, the staff, and the in-house scalable infrastructure to store and support the data and system in order to allow for growth and adjustments.

Giganews systems are built from the ground up on our own multi-redundant network of servers. The Internet doesn’t open at 8 and close at 5, so our datacenter is staffed around-the-clock to keep things up and running.

Whether an article is 6 days old or 650, you get the same high-quality completeness, availability and unlimited speed through Giganews.

Curious to learn how Giganews does it? Learn more about how Giganews works.

We are a passionate group of Usenet users with a goal of creating and providing the most efficient and satisfactory Usenet experience. Have some feedback? We want to hear from you. Join the newsgroup conversation at giganews.general or start a discussion by commenting below.

Giganews Hits 600 Days of High Quality Retention!

Giganews is proud to announce that we are the first Usenet provider with 600 days of retention! Giganews now provides 600 days of retention with the same high quality and service Giganews customers expect. And we’re still growing! We continue to increase retention to provide Giganews customers with the best Usenet experience available.

Why Giganews Works So Well
We do it because we’re users, too (check out the newsgroup vyprvpn.giganews to see some candid discussions with Giganews employees on VyprVPN). Customers tell us everyday how frustrated they are with other Usenet providers because of poor completion rates and incompletes, especially among older articles. No one wants to deal with that. That’s why we built our service to have the same 100% availability, completeness, and unlimited speed regardless of how old the article is.

How It Works
So how do we do it? It all starts from the bottom up by building and maintaining all the systems for our services ourselves. We don’t outsource or contract this critical aspect of our Usenet service. Instead we’ve built all of our systems ourselves – from the hardware we own, the software we wrote, and the network we built. All this leads to smooth running systems providing the best Usenet experience available today. Plus, with our full time network and datacenter operations staff, we’ve got some very experienced people who make sure the Giganews service is always up and running.

We’ve hit 600 days. 700 here we come.

Have some feedback? Let us know what you think!

Giganews’ 200 Days Binary Retention: A Look Back

200 day, usenet, binary, retention, upgrade
200 Day Usenet Binary Retention: A Look Back
Giganews upgrade Usenet newsgroup binary retention to 200 days
As you’ve probably seen plastered across every Usenet related newsgroup and forum, Giganews recently announced a storage upgrade which will increase Giganews’ retention in binary newsgroups to 200 days by the end of the summer. This is in addition to Giganews currently holding text articles for more than 1400 days.

This got us thinking about Giganews’ retention growth over time. Giganews has always been a leader in Usenet and one of the primary ways we offer value to our customers is through our retention. We took a look back and documented some of our retention upgrades throughout the years….

Binary Newsgroup Retention

August 2001 – 14 days
October 2002 – 15 days
December 2003 – 30 days
August 2005 – 50 days
December 2005 – 70 days
September 2006 – 90 days
February 2007 – 100 days
April 2007 – 120 days
July 2007 – 200 days

That’s a 1,328% increase in retention since 2001!

As you can see, Giganews has been very busy over the years making sure we’re offering the best Usenet experience possible. If you haven’t already signed up for Giganews’ service try out our free trial account to see for yourself why Giganews is the leader in Usenet.

Giganews “For Dummies”

newsgroups, usenet, book
Giganews “For Dummies”
Giganews gets mentioned in a new book
Giganews would like to send out a special thank you to Woody Leonhard the author of “Windows Vista Timesaving Techniques For Dummies” for mentioning Giganews in his book!

In the chapter “Technique 20: Downloading from Newsgroups” Woody states…

“I, Personally, use Giganews. It’s fast. They claim 99%+ completion. Binaries stick around for 90 days or more.”

(Obviously this was written before Giganews’ last retention upgrades to 100 and then to 120 days.)

The chapter is one of the most comprehensive “how to” instructions on Usenet we’ve ever read, and is an excellent read for anyone looking to learn how to use Usenet (especially good for first time users!).

If you’re running on Vista, purchase a copy of “Windows Vista Timesaving Techniques For Dummies” and check out the mention of Giganews on page 216.

Thanks Woody!