Remember a year back when the retention wars were really heating up? Well this article is a blast from the not-so-distant past if you do. If you have absolutely no idea what we're talking about, that's OK. We're talking about the newsgroups, and some of the features you might find with a news server.

Back in the day, a news server might have a month's worth of retention - or the total time an article stays on a server. Binary newsgroups actually had their retention time specifically set much lower than a text newsgroup. This is still sorta true in a legacy sense, but storage hardware has become so cheap that such aggressive bandwidth conservation isn't generally practiced.

With that surge of cheap hardware came the retention wars. This was practiced by the major backbone providers such as Astraweb and Giganews (and of course their affiliates). The bulk of the retention wars lasted from about January 2009 until fall of that year. At that time, 300-400 days retention was considered cutting edge.

But eventually the general attitude became, "enough is enough!" As many Usenet fans know, most articles are reposted within several months anyway. That's not to say that long term retention isn't wanted or not appreciated. Rather, the competition itself became moot - 50 or even 100 days separation between different news providers generally means nothing once you hit 400+ days retention.

In any event, news providers are investing heavily in their infrastructure - which tends to make sense as certain portions of the BitTorrent population are jumping ship. Newshosting just hit 650 days, which means many others will also hit this milestone.

Thankfully they didn't accompany this with a increased connection capacity to 100...sheesh.

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