yes lots of spam but hopefully if more people use them discussion will come back and spam will stop.
Eternal September is limited on retention for the groups they carry. Should you find that you want to go back for historical discussion or nostalgia you can pay a bit for a commercial server to get posts going back many years. block accounts (set amount of data) will be fine as it will take forever to use up gigabytes with only text posts. 5 gigs or less is fine and usually only cost a few bucks. Blocknews.net has 5 for $2.
Yes plenty of other providers. you see those 4 or 5 in search because they pay big money to be there. There are also a lot of fake review websites that pimp them because they pay a lot of money to those sites to suggest them. something the small providers can not compete with.
one thing that bothers me greatly: I’ve checked the privacy policy for the most 3 known providers (news hosting, Usenet server and euweka) and, first of all, i find incredibly sus that these seemingly 3 different providers have a sort of copy pasted privacy policy. Then, I noticed there is this magic line on it
they are all owned under the same company, these are just three different brands they operate under. they arent the best privacy wise and would probably roll over on you if push came to shove.
NGD and Viper are pretty much both the same backbone.
yes seems silly they would do it for usenet but i would have said the same thing a few years ago about vpn. i guess things are fine until they arent.. my main surprise in the vpn case was their willingness to work with the feds. they told them once we dont have anything and then THEY contacted the feds and said hey, ask again why dont you.
This was discussed on reddit a bit ago. The same company in place now ran IPVanish and they logged and rolled over on the user. No reason to think they wouldnt do the same with privado and if you are ultra worried tin foil hat-ish, would they do the same with their usenet? who knows. https://torrentfreak.com/ipvanish-no-logging-vpn-led-homeland-security-to-comcast-user-180505/
Usenet is considered decentralized, it is made up of many independent servers that talk to each other. take one down, and the rest continue on without problems.
i would ditch the blocks and just get https://frugalusenet.com you shouldnt notice a difference and now you will have unlimited and not have to watch the meter.
if you just want the popular stuff they will be fine since they keep that since many download it but if you veer off that path they have poor completion since their system does not keep everything. but even then with other services at similar prices you can get better for the same price.
blocks could be a bit restrictive unless you reliably download the same each month so you have predictable usage. if you ever deviate or find yourself having to hold back so you dont burn up your block, an unlimited account may be better and then you dont have to worry. unlimited is cheap enough now.
Newsdemon isnt the best by any means but an alright deal none the less.