I am going to start by saying I am trying to avoid reddit, as such, this is probably information that has been asked MANY times and I also found similar reddit posts that I just didn’t want to click on. So here goes.

I am currently wanting to move from my NL hosted VPS that I use with my torrents. I normally only use a single private tracker and have a 2.5 ratio with 25tb overhead. I have just done things relativity manually and just download top things for the day on my tracker, as well was auto-tools with rutorrent setup for rss feed automated downloads.

My current project for my library is to migrate to the arr’s for all of this. As I have learned these a bit, I have decided that I would like to move towards usenet and start using it, along side of my current private tracker.

While cost is a factor, it is not that much of an issue. My questions are;

  1. what would be a decent usenet provider? The biggest thing that I want out of it would be speed. I want my releases to download as fast as possible. I am based in the US I also would like to have a decent provider with a decent retention, although it isn’t that big of a deal.

  2. what indexers would be worth while to pursue and add to prowlarr? I have signed up for free accounts on nzbgeek and nzbplanet. A similar search that is not on my private tracker, I found nzb geek had episode 2, while planet had both episode 1 and 2 available.

My downloads are really only movies and tv shows.

It has been so long since I have been in usenet, but I was looking at joining giganews, but wanted to see if they are even worth the cost for what I am after.

Thank you all for you help on this. I appreciate your time on my questions that get asked daily.

  • pcjonesEnglish
    7•1 year ago

    Usenet providers:

    Ewaka is the go to provider, however they are based in the netherlands so your speed may vary. An alternative would be frugal usenet as they also do have a US based server, but Ewakas retention is way better. If you use SABnzbd as downloader you could even add both frugal and ewaka with the same priority if you can’t max out your speed with one. Maybe you can try ewaka for 1 month first and see if it’s good enough for you.

    Special links that lead to the cheapest offers:

    I saw that you mentioned giganews, however based on a quick search I saw that they seem to have a really bad reputation nowadays

    Usenet Indexers:

    I can’t tell you anything about nzbplanet as I never used it, but nzbGeek is a good start. You’ll need a paid membership for every indexer though, a free membership won’t allow for *arr automatisation.

    https://ninjacentral.co.za/ just opened registrations yesterday, they are also quite good.

    https://drunkenslug.com is great indexer, however registrations are closed at the moment - you can easily find an invite though if you lurk around here.

      • pcjonesEnglish
        2•1 year ago

        That really depends on your connection. On my EU based VPS with dedicated 1 GBit I get 70-105MB/s when connecting to their EU server

        edit: Try playing around with your number of connections, you can have both not enough or too many.