The news server industry is a fascinating place. The marketing involved is even more amazing. Newcomers to the Usenet market are often confronted with a barrage of deals, offers, and most importantly - features. There are four major features to consider when buying a news server account - retention, completion, connections, and security. Let's talk about why we feel many of these features are totally overrated and what you should concentrate on instead.

First off is retention - a highly touted number by most Usenet providers. Most serious providers these days are advertising well over 500 days and within a few months will hit two years of binary retention. That's 24 months worth of access to binary data - but 2 years worth it?

The truth of the matter, as we see it, is that anything over 7 months is unnecessary. Why? Because anything that's posted will likely be reposted within a few months anyway. The good news is that growing retention is simply a result of cheaper hardware - you don't have to pay anything extra for more retention. But don't worry too much about this feature when you're deciding on a provider since most providers have the same retention.

Another feature that's generally solid by default is completion. This is a characteristic that describes how many articles have successfully transferred from sever to server (a process known as propagation). Back in the day before reliable propagation and PAR2 recovery files, a news server with poor retention could ruin a hard night's download. But today, most commercial providers have well over 90% completion.

Now on to the "value added" features, or places where you can save some money.

One of these features is connections. Oh boy. How many newsgroup providers are advertising 30, 50, or more connections? A lot, we know! The bottom line with connections is this: they represent the number of simultaneous data transfers that occur between the news reader and the news server.

Due to the nature of Usenet binary downloading, data transfers are constantly starting and stopping. Only small amounts of data are transferred at a time. In other words, a few megabytes will download quickly, but there will be a pause when the next article is ready to download. This causes a delay in the download process, but it's overcome by overlapping these delays with additional connections. However, it doesn't take much to overcome this issue - most US broadband users can maximize their download speed with only 5-10 connections. Don't waste your money buying extra connections!