Giganews

The World's Best Usenet Provider

GIGANEWS BLOG

What Giganews Doesn’t Do

giganews, maintenance, usenet, retention
What Giganews Doesn’t Do
Giganews discusses maintenance windows, retention upgrades, news server capacity, and binary retention claims.
You may be familiar with all the things Giganews does, like increasing our retention, launching encrypted Usenet access, and developing the Giganews Accelerator, but do you know about all the things that Giganews doesn’t do?

Maintenance Windows

A complex server cluster like Giganews’ Usenet system requires maintenance all the time. We have to replace hard drives, swap out servers, update operating systems, and a whole host of other tasks.

Even though from time to time we need to take down certain parts of our cluster, we never actually have to take our service off line. This means Giganews’ service is always available and isn’t subject to maintenance windows similar to what is experienced through other Usenet servers. We are also able to take down elements of the network without negatively affecting the download speeds of our customers.

Weekend Rush

One of the more common problems people report with Usenet servers are slow download speeds related to increased traffic. This is most often experienced during the period of increased Usenet usage over the weekend, called the “weekend rush”. When news servers have very little capacity, customers experience slow download speeds when usage increases.

Giganews maintains extremely high levels of capacity so that weekend rushes or increased usage driven by service improvements (i.e. 200 days binary retention) don’t affect the speeds at which our customers can download.

Upgrade Pains

Giganews has completed many upgrades to our storage and server clusters over the years. These upgrades include adding and replacing storage, adding servers, and moving to new data center locations. These upgrades are generally seamless for our customers and very rarely even noticed.

For most of Giganews’ customers the only sign that an upgrade has taken place is all the extra retention!

Many Usenet systems, in trying to keep pace with Giganews’ break neck retention upgrades, experience problems almost immediately after an upgrade. These problems include lost articles, downtime, and roll backs (undoing the upgrade).

Giganews is a bit spoiled because we have a top-notch team of engineers and programmers who have developed a custom, in-house Usenet server application. This custom Usenet server application was developed 100% in house and utilizes proprietary code (it’s not an open source or third party Usenet application). Our server software is designed to let us upgrade both code and hardware without interrupting service to our customers.

“Funny” Retention

Many Usenet servers will advertise retention levels which don’t exactly match their actual retention. They may carry long retention in certain groups or even forgo carrying some groups all together in an attempt to reduce the size of the news feed.

These techniques allow certain Usenet servers to advertise “up to X days retention”. While this may be technically correct (even if the advertised retention is only available in one group) the reality of the situation is that these claims aren’t exactly accurate.

Because of Giganews’ robust Usenet system and our vast storage capabilities, we don’t have to hand pick newsgroups in which to offer long retention. We also carry the full suite of newsgroups, so we’re not reducing the number of newsgroups we carry in an attempt to make it seem as if we have more retention than we really do.

Giganews is able to stand by our service levels without having to use “funny” retention statistics to make our service look better than it really is.

Announcing: Nothing

We’re always excited to announce improvements to our service, but writing announcements about how everything is okay isn’t exactly exciting news. We don’t talk a lot about how our upgrades, maintenance, and retention management all run smoothly, but we feel this is an important part of the value Giganews provides to our customers.

The next time you notice Giganews increasing retention or adding features to our service, remember that there is a lot of complex work going on behind the scenes to make sure we’re delivering the level of service you expect without having to interrupt your access or slow down our service.

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!

1 Billion Usenet Articles

newsgroups, usenet, articles
1 Billion Usenet Articles
Observations on Giganews’ 1 billion article capacity
As we were writing our recent announcement regarding our upgrade to 120 days retention, I was surprised to discover that our news servers were offering nearly 1 billion newsgroup articles in over 100,000 newsgroups.

This is a significant achievement for Usenet, which was originally designed to handle only a few dozen articles per day.

In Usenet’s beginning there was a steady march of Usenet server software development centered on the evolving challenges of a growing community. These evolutions of server software were primarily spearheaded by graduate students working in their spare time to solve problems with matters such as naming conventions, performance, and portability.

Since the early days of Usenet, a lot of things have changed. Internet access in the developed world is commonplace, personal computers are widespread and readily available, and Usenet has grown to over 100,000 newsgroups.

Now that Usenet is a global network with countless participants, the landscape has changed. No longer will the collaborative efforts of graduate students working in their spare time solve the challenges of operating a Usenet network processing nearly a billion newsgroup articles. These challenges require significant investment, time, and experience.

Luckily for Giganews, we have a loyal customer base which allows us to focus our efforts on reinvesting in our network and technology. This investment has been used to develop a scalable, patent-pending news server software platform designed around plug and play storage upgrades.

It is this technology that allows Giganews to perform massive retention upgrades with no service interruptions. Seamless upgrades are one of the more understated things that we do at Giganews, and are something our company and our customers tend to take for granted.

Service improvements like our 120 day retention upgrade represent huge engineering challenges, but thanks to tremendous efforts by our programmers and engineers, Giganews is able to deliver these advancements with little to no impact on our service.

Now that Giganews has taken Usenet to the next level and is making Usenet more accessible than ever before, I wanted to take a second to thank our engineering staff for developing systems and technologies which allow Giganews to improve service for our customers with virtually no downtime. If you enjoy Giganews’ service, post a comment on this blog post and let our engineers know how much you appreciate them!

Giganews in Cambodia

newsgroups, usenet, travel
Giganews in Cambodia
Giganews makes an appearance in Cambodia
Below is a picture of Jerry from Giganews’ design department with his Giganews t shirt on at the Angkor Wat temple in Siem Riep, Cambodia. Jerry snapped this photograph on his trip to Bien Hoa, Vietnam to visit family. Thanks Jerry for the cool pic!

Accurately Measuring Usenet Retention

newsgroups, usenet, retention
Accurately Measuring Usenet Retention
Notes explaining Usenet retention statistics
As you may have seen, Giganews recently announced a storage upgrade which will raise our binary retention to 100 days over the next two weeks. This got me thinking about how retention is measured and reported by various Usenet servers.

Articles on a news server are commonly stored “first in / last out”. What this means is that every time a new article is posted to a Usenet system the oldest article is deleted. The oldest available article on a news server is generally what defines a news server’s retention.

Some Usenet systems will also apply this “first in / last out” rule based on hierarchy.

For example, Giganews does not expire any text articles so our text retention is 1300+ days. Our binary retention (based on available storage) is 100 days. This means that it takes 100 days for a newsgroup article to drop off of our servers in the binary hierarchies.

When you’re discussing a news server’s retention make sure you understand exactly which hierarchy you’re referencing. If you see people refer to a news server’s retention based on text hierarchies then chances are they’re embellishing to make the news server seem better. In reality their retention in the more challenging binary hierarchies is probably much lower.

In addition to people using text retention to embellish the quality of a news server, you’ll also see some Usenet systems carry long retention rates in just a handful of newsgroups. If we use our simple definition of retention— “the oldest available article on a news server”— then this would be an accurate description of that news server’s retention. Of course most people aren’t going to want long retention on just a handful of newsgroups, so you could consider this misleading. Many people sign up for Giganews after using other Usenet servers which advertise long retention rates but provide those retention rates in just a couple of newsgroups.

The final thing to look out for when trying to measure retention is “invalid date headers”. In some newsgroups the headers of certain articles will contain the wrong date. In the beginning of this post, I said that most news servers apply a “first in / last out” rule to newsgroups and that the oldest article on a news server defines its retention. What I didn’t mention is that the “first in / last out rule” is based on article numbers (number assigned to an article based on when it is posted) and not the date displayed in the headers. This means that if an article contains a date in the header older than the retention of the news server it still may appear in the newsgroup because it hasn’t been purged based on its article number.

The best measure of a news server’s retention is to look at the oldest article date in *many* popular binary newsgroups. This will generally give you the best idea of the news server’s retention. If you notice a few groups with longer than normal retention, the news server is either hand picking certain newsgroups to misrepresent their overall retention levels or there is an article with an invalid date header.

Alternate NNTP Usenet SSL Ports

newsgroups, usenet, ssl, encryption
Alternate NNTP Usenet SSL Ports
Alternate ports for SSL NNTP access
As you may have already seen, Giganews recently announced support for 256 bit SSL encrypted Usenet access on port 443. The reason we decided to offer support for port 443 is that some customers were experiencing slow download speeds on port 563 due to port-based speed limiting on networks between their computer and Giganews.

One of the quickest ways to get around speed issues is to try switching ports. Many customers downloading on non-encrypted accounts have already found this out by switching their Usenet downloads from port 119 to port 80. This trick oftentimes quickly improves throughput rates when the source of the slowdown is port based-bandwidth limiting (networks limiting speeds on port 119).

There are two advantages to downloading Giganews’ 256 bit SSL encrypted Usenet access over port 443. First, it will help you avoid port based speed limiting on port 563. Secondly, you may also avoid service-based speed limiting as your NNTP traffic is completely encrypted and running over a web-based port (port 443).

The goal of Giganews’ support for port 443 is to offer our customers another path to access our encrypted Usenet service and to assist customers dealing with port based speed limits.

If you have experienced speed issues while downloading on port 563 and notice a speed improvement while downloading on port 443, please feel free to leave us a comment.

Usenet on the Go

newsgroups, usenet
Usenet on the Go
Use a USB stick to access Usenet from anywhere

At Giganews, we love to try all sorts of gadgets and applications to make our day a little easier. Which is why when we learned about an application that allows you to access Usenet away from your desktop/laptop using any computer and a USB thumb-drive, we were itching to try it.

How does it work?

For starters, you need to download a program called MojoPac and have access to a USB thumb-drive (my drive was a twenty dollar 1GB Memorex USB thumb-drive). Note: MojoPac will ONLY run off of flash-based removable storage devices. Also, MojoPac only works on 32-bit Windows XP based OS’s, sorry Mac.

After downloading MojoPac you need to run the install and point it to your thumb-drive. MojoPac will create a profile setting for you similar to creating a new user profile in Windows XP. All of your personal settings, shortcuts and … installed programs are accessed via your MojoPac “virtual desktop” stored on the thumb-drive. Awesome!

Usenet Testing
To test Usenet access, I installed NewsBin Pro and Newsleecher from my MojoPac desktop portal on my thumb-drive, and after configuring the servers, subscribing to my favorite newsgroups and some last minute tweaking, I was browsing Usenet Newsgroups without any noticeable drop in speed or performance. Pretty cool! Better yet, all of my subscribed groups, server settings, etc, are retained every time I start my news client within MojoPac. Security isn’t a problem using Giganews’ SSL feature and the stealthy ability of MojoPac to secure your files apart from the host computer. After unplugging my drive, no trace of my activity was left on the host computer. That’s because everything resides within my MojoPac profile stored on my thumb-drive. Simple and Powerful!

With MojoPac, access Usenet Newsgroups anywhere using any Windows XP host computer and flash-based portable USB thumb-drive, now that’s cool.

If you have any suggestions or tips on unique ways of accessing Usenet, comment below. We’d love to hear from you.