For years and years, I had a nice account with a bay area company that worked out fine, until these massive dvd postings started eating up retention space. Then I had the multiple block accounts chasing fills and such, got to be a real drag....
So I 'bit the bullet' and paid GN the $25/month, starting a bit over 3 years ago. Didn't look back.
Then, about 6-8 months ago, I started getting 'message not found' errors on nzb's that were d/l'ed from Newzbin; now, I simply went back to the Newzbin entry, and saw that, according to them, all the files/parts had been verified. Hmmm.
So, I went a took a look at some of those old block accounts, and lo and behold, the 'missing' GN parts were there! I d/l'ed a few to make absolutely sure, and yep, they were, my newsreader wasn't lying to me.
Then, the problems slowly went away... took a couple days, but those missing parts on GN 'showed up'.
This has happend about 1-2 times a month ever since, This last time, I was blithely going along, minding my own business, keeping my d/l'ing around 400MB/month, when yet again, tons of 'message not found'.
Well, it's pure aggravation. Aggravation, I might add, I'm paying a (ever increasing) premium price for.
So, tonight, I did some tests with Astraweb, and found that their throughput (with those 20 connections) is just about 2-3 times faster than Giganews is. The three times faster ms ping times, and half the route hops, REALLY makes them faster rather than the 3500 miles cross country trip to Giganews.
So, yes, I'll keep the Giganews account as it is for a week or so, before tearing it down. I'll stomp on the hammer on Astraweb and see how it goes.
