We're a small group of veteran Usenet users who got tired of reading the same review sites that rank the same five providers at the top without mentioning they're all owned by the same company.

Between us, we've been using Usenet since the early 2000s. We've run every version of the arr stack. We've written our own NZB tooling. We've posted to Usenet, not just downloaded from it. We've watched providers come and go, watched backbones consolidate, and watched the review ecosystem calcify around a set of recommendations that serve the industry more than they serve users.

So we built this site.

What This Site Does

We review every major Usenet provider we can get our hands on. We test them with our own tools, not with marketing summaries. We rank them based on criteria we publish openly on our methodology page. We weight backbone disclosure heavily: who actually operates the infrastructure behind each provider, and whether they're honest about it. That's the factor most other review sites ignore, and it's the one that matters most when you're building a multi-provider setup where article path diversity is the whole point.

Every review on this site is written by someone who has actually used the service. Every claim is either backed by our testing data, sourced from publicly available community discussion, or stated as opinion and labeled as such.

What This Site Doesn't Do

  • We don't run ads.
  • We don't take affiliate commissions. The links in our reviews go to the provider's own site with no tracking codes, no referral parameters, no revenue share.
  • We don't accept payment for placement. Nobody has paid to be on our best providers list and nobody will.
  • We don't run Google Analytics, Facebook pixels, or any third-party tracking scripts. Check the network tab in your browser's dev tools if you want to verify.

We pay for the server ourselves. The domain is registered with privacy WHOIS. The site runs behind Cloudflare on a standard VPS. There's no business model here beyond "we wanted this to exist."

Why We Talk About Backbone Disclosure So Much

Because nobody else does, and it's the single most important thing to understand about the Usenet provider market right now.

Omicron Media (through Highwinds Network Group) owns Newshosting, Eweka, UsenetServer, Easynews, Tweaknews, and several other brands. They all share one backbone. Shared backbones aren't unusual in Usenet. The problem is marketing five brands as if they compete. If you buy two of them thinking you're getting redundancy, you're not. You're paying twice for the same infrastructure.

Most review sites either don't mention this or treat it as a footnote. We treat it as a primary ranking factor. Not because Omicron's infrastructure is bad. It isn't. But because users deserve to know what they're buying before they buy it.

Read the full breakdown on our methodology page and our investigation into recommendation patterns on r/usenet.

Get in Touch

Corrections, disagreements, tips, and questions are all welcome. Reach us through the contact page.