Huh? I was at Hitnews.EU, what happened?
You've been redirected to this page because Hitnews.EU no longer supports international customers. We'd like to explain ourselves.
The reason is actually very simple and involves, as always, money. International traffic is very expensive. We didn't realize this when we started but it turned out our international customers were actually costing us money.
So we had to do something about this. One option was to just block all international traffic and continue as a dutch provider. But we wanted to keep our loyal international customers satisfied so we set up the website you're on right now: Xennews.Com.
There's really no great way to say this so here goes: Yes, Xennews.Com is more expensive than Hitnews.EU.
According to whois registration, Xennews is owned by VT Media, the same parent company as Hitnews. Not surprisingly, they have made it fairly easy to transfer accountsto this new higher-priced service at Xennews.
Although once the lowest-priced unlimited usenet service available anywhere, Hitnews users recently had prices increased from €6.50 to €7.50 per month, and now non-Dutch users will have to fork over €12,50 (about $17.50 US) if they want to stay loyal to Hitnews' parent company. Xennews does offer a few extras over Hitnews, like better retention and more connections. Although listed at 120 days retention, I grabbed a 135 day file without problem using their free trial.
Americans may fondly remember the days when the US dollar was on parity with the Euro, but now anything priced in Euros is relatively expensive when converted to US dollars. And paying €12,50/$17.50 per month, while probably an average list price for a Dutch provider, is hardly price-competitive for usenet. The only real advantage Xennews offers over other usenet providers is that, like Hitnews, Xennews allows account sharing (however they define that) so users wanting to share their account with friends to save money have few other options than to join Xennews.
Existing Hitnews.EU customers
If you have an active account at Hitnews.EU and you ended up here you can log in with your existing username and password at http://member.xennews.com/login.php. Your account has been transfered including any time you had left.
Please change the server from news.hitnews.eu into news.xennews.com.
Considering that most customers probably chose Hitnews for their ultra-low prices, I expect few users (other than multi-person account-sharing pools) to accept their offer to join this new service with such a steep price increase when there are better deals available.
Hitnews users - presumably smart shoppers - who 'go solo' might do well to consider Astraweb's $11/month unlimited/20 connection/SSL/160 day retention "Kleverig Special" while it lasts, which they promise will never increase in price as long as users keep an active subscription. Probably the best bang-for-buck currently available in unlimited usenet that I know of - although no account-sharing allowed.
http://www.news.astraweb.com/specials/kleverig-11.html
We closed the site some time ago, just forgot to update my signature