Block News offers a great retention rate, free SSL and a no expiration policy on all Gigabytes. Some of the competitors force their customers to continue their subscription or their Gigabytes will run out- not Block News! Not only that, they offer SSL with every price plan. They offer block price plans that are quite inexpensive too! We broke it all down for you to really see what they offer over the competitors and what they forgot to include.
Retention: Block News offers a 1, 050 day binary retention and a 730 day text retention. This is definitely up there with the competitors but it is still not the best retention that we have seen.
Anonymity: They currently offer free SSL with every price plan available. This is a feature that we do not see every Usenet provider offer and it is a great way to get new customers and hold the old ones.
Pricing: The great thing about Block News is that they offer an unlimited expiration date so you only have to pay once. They only offer block plans however. They offer multiple different block plans to choose from though. Some of the plans that we ran into were:
– 5 GB block – $2.75
– 50 GB block – $11.79
– 1,024 GB block – $91.39
As you can see, they offer some really great block plans for quite cheap. If you are a light Usenet user some of these plan will last you forever! Not only that, you can get 5GB for only $2.75 and it doesn’t ever expire; this is a pretty decent price tag.
Speed: Block News currently offers up to 50 connections on 4 different servers that are located within Europe and the United States. Although only 2 of the servers offer SSL, having multiple servers is a good feature to have that some of the competitors do not include.
Features: Some of the features that we noticed were their 99% completion rate and the fact that they have 85, 000 available news groups. Some of the competitors that we have listed on our home page have 100, 000+ news groups so before signing on with Block news, you will want to make sure that they have your favorite news groups available, especially if you like using rather unknown newsgroups. If one isn’t available you can simply ask them to include it.
Recommendation:
I would recommend Block News to those of you who are looking for some great block plans. Not every competitor offers block plans and the prices seem to be alright. As well, they offer SSL and a 99% completion rate. The only thing that bothered me was that they only had 85, 000 news groups available. The fact that they have a pretty good retention rate and up top 50 connections seems to make me feel better about that though. I would recommend them to anyone who is looking for a great block provider. Just make sure you double check that they have your favorite news groups available. As well, they only have e-mail support to make sure that you have every question answered before you slap down your credit card number. You can also check out some of the other Usenet providers we have featured on our home page.
