What is Usenet/Newsgroups?
What is Usenet?
Before Facebook™, MySpace™ and other social networking sites; before, Digg™, reddit™ and other news aggregation sites; before even the world wide web, the Usenet served these purposes and more. Developed in 1979 by two Duke University graduate students, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, the Usenet is a globally distributed discussion system composed of over 110,000 Newsgroups, each focusing on a different subject.
Similar in idea to the modern "forum" style website, the Usenet allows people to post articles into one of the topical newsgroups which can be read and responded to by other people interested in the same topic. Unlike simple forum websites which are generally single servers which focus on a single subject, the Usenet is a network of servers interlinked around the globe, extending the reach of one posted article to millions of potential readers. With this simple model, the Usenet provides a powerful medium for discourse on a wide variety of topics from philosophy, literature, computing and technology, gaming, news and current events, and just about anything you can imagine.
The Usenet is thriving with millions of articles being posted every hour and terabytes of articles every day.
Also separating it from a forum-style website is the fact that there is no personal registration required to participate in a newsgroup, and archives of articles are always available by virtue of the distributed nature of the Usenet.
Architecture of the Usenet
Fundamentally, the Usenet is a set of protocols that define the generating, storing, and retrieving of "articles" which are very similar to normal Internet email messages. The most critical protocol, which drives the growth of the Usenet, enables Usenet servers to "peer" with each other to exchange and distribute articles. Whenever an article reaches a server, that Usenet server then forwards it to all of its neighbors who do not yet have the article, thus eventually propagating it to all servers who exist within the mesh of the Usenet. This arrangement makes the Usenet very robust and reliable, as there are many paths that an article can take until it eventually is distributed to all servers.
Although similar to the idea of modern "p2p" networks, this Usenet peering is not done between end-users, but between the servers themselves, and the articles are stored on these servers. Accessing the Usenet is handled by a "news" client which connects to the Usenet server and allows access to the articles, decoupling the end user from the process of exchanging and storing the information. There are many news clients available for almost every computer platform today such as Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and you can check out our client recommendations and configuration guides to get you started.
The overall traffic on the Usenet has grown each year from its humble beginnings from around 4.5 gigabytes per day in 1996 to almost 5.5 terabytes per day in 2010. To truly provide a complete Usenet experience, a Usenet provider must have a massive infrastructure of servers and storage to both store this daily volume of articles and provide fast access to them. The capacity for a Usenet provider to store articles is generally defined as their Retention. Newsrazor provides over 900+ days of "binary" retention and over 1900 days of "text" retention, making us one of the leading providers of Usenet access.
Multiple 10• gigabit fiber backbone connections in the US and Europe and direct connections to many broadband ISP providers gives you the fastest possible access to our servers with the lowest number of hops and extremely low latency.
256-bit SSL Encryption available on all connections keeps your browsing secure and private. We never share your information with outside parties or track your usage unless required by law.
Newsrazor has been in the Usenet Business since 2006 and those years of experience have helped us create one of the most reliable and fast usenet server infrastructures in the industry.