Astraweb has the best retention of any block account I know of. 125+ days via NZBs. Astraweb owns their own server farm, unlike Usenet-News and many of the rest of the hundreds of Usenet "providers" that are just resellers that connect you to the same Highwinds/UNS back-end servers.
Any retention issues on one provider (reseller) are therefore going to be duplicated on many others. When shopping for a NSP, I always find out what company they are using for their back-end servers. Commonly it is Highwinds owned.
[quote="gsore"l]NEWSGROUPDIRECT ... The cheapest block 50 and 100 accounts[/quote]
Let's compare NewsgroupDirect.com with Usenet-News.net:
The 50 GB block costs the same ($15) on both Usenet-News and NewsgroupDirect
The 100GB block is $1 less at NewsgroupDirect.
The main difference is that NewsgroupDirect gives free headers, while Usenet-News no longer does, instead giving everyone an extra 10% of download volume (so when you buy a 100 GB account at Usenet-News you actually get 110 GB of download). So for someone who uses NZB sites instead of downloading headers (ie - most of us) Usenet-News comes out cheaper than NewsgroupDirect on all accounts.
As I mentioned a few posts back, news4u2.com has the cheapest 100GB block (that I know about) at $20. I just found out that they appear to use the same back-end servers as Usenet.com (which is Newsfeeds.com server farm) which makes me wonder if they are now blocking all MP3 groups like Usenet.com (which was sued recently)