Giganews reevaluated
I’ve been signed up with Giganews for a couple of years.
Used to use Easynews for a while in conjunction with a great usenet program called Thoth written for the Mac. I was living in Japan at the time and wanted a way to catch up on the odd UK TV program. Eventually development discontinued and support stopped. The program was still available and worked fine, but I’ve never got excited about using something that isn’t getting constantly updated. I couldn’t find another usenet program I liked and I’d moved back to the UK, so I gave up Easynews and fell back on my free Teranews account whilst continuing a half hearted search.
Then I found usenet indexing sites. And newzbin.com. And SABnzbd. The simplicity compared to the old way of downloading headers for a group, searching through, downloading headers for the next group etc was incredible. It was time to start paying for a premium usenet account again.
Giganews is great. Loads of retention, no problem with server speeds. If I use all my allocation in one month, then the next month just starts early. I was very happy. Until today.
I’m back in Japan, and back to wanting to download some UK TV. I soon started to reach my 10GB monthly limit and wanted a more permanent solution. So I upgraded to the Diamond account which came with VPN access (not UK though), unlimited downloads and a usenet browser to browse the whole of giganews 3+years of retention. I had half an idea that they would soon be introducing a UK VPN server, so I’d be able to use BBC iPlayer as well as having secure browsing if I needed it. There was an offer of half price for the first month. And I could see that prices for the service would be increasing in January, but I could get and keep the old price if I signed up now.
I signed up, the Mimo usenet browser was pants, not having a UK VPN server was a problem, and there were no reports of having one on the horizon (despite there appearing to have been one at one point). So I signed up with StrongVPN for VPN access (awesome VPN, rubbish customer support) and today went to downgrade my account back to Bronze.
When I noticed that where in the past I’d been paying $7.99 a month for the service, it had now gone up to $9.99. Quick google later, and indeed their prices had gone up in November, but existing customers remained on the rate they always had paid. Since I’d just messed around upgrading and downgrading, however, I didn’t get to keep my previous rate and had to start paying the new rate. Another quick google and astraweb was a popular alternative with a similar plan for $9.99 a month, but with 25GB download limit and retention in the same ball park. Much better. I don’t often get near the 10GB limit, but if I did I wouldn’t have to be paying any extra.
Until I saw the Pay As You Go offer. 25GB for $10.
Here are my stats for my Giganews account usage for the last couple of years.
So I’d paid a total of $290.76 for 106GB over the course of two years. With the same astraweb PAYG plan, that would have cost just over $40.