South Africans - I need your help pleeease..

[Vinyl_Vern]

Hi All,

For the past 2 weeks the free local news servers have been down, namely:

(Telkom) - news.saix.net and also news2.saix.net
(Internet Solutions)- news.is.co.za

On these servers connections where great and they supported full ISP line speed. I have personally phoned both these companies to ask if their servers are down and both have guaranteed me everything is fine (Not true)

I've had to sign up for a XSUSENET account - it works fine, but there are 3 issues:

1) Their free account limits you to 1MB speed
2) They have a 10 day retention
3) I'm now using international bandwidth which gets my ISP to throttle me, whereas before I could get my full speeds all month due to using local bandwidth (They dont seems to be bothered about the amount of local used)

So with that all said I'm hoping there are other South Africans who might be able to assist me with a local free news server? Has anybody picked up the same issue?

Your assistance and guidance would be appreciated.

Thanks!

[MrYuuZA]

If you have to go through that much trouble then rather get a premium provider (eg Astraweb) as it is over 3year retention and no speed limit (where stated on the said provider page).

Been using NewsDemon for just over 8 months now and have over 1TB downloaded with very few issues. iSP is Afrihost on their 2MB uncapped solution.

Btw , who is your iSP? It is possible they are putting more restrictions to lessen the network load.

Personally i would advise to go premium

[Vinyl_Vern]

Hey Yuuza,

Thanks for your reply.

Sounds great, I'm aware of a few sites that offer great download speeds, retention etc. But theres a fee for that firstly (minimal I know), but we have/had the option to get it for free.

The main reason I haven't signed onto an overseas usenet net is because I'd be junk up international bandwidth.

Have you checked to see if Afrihost is throttling you at any time of the day...or possibly towards the end of the month once you've exceeded lets say 30 or 40GB for the month?

[Hilux4x4]

We have a premium account with Astraweb, using Vox telecoms.

Almost every single download fails (repair Blocks missing)

We retried the downloads using astraweb on Crystal Web and each and every download completed successfully using both Astraweb and the Crystal Web NNTP server.

Has anybody been experiencing similar issues?