Re: Astraweb
 

All good for me too, maxes out mine with 10 connections SSL

Re: Astraweb
 

You still on 10Mb?? Never needed more than 6 on the EU servers, only ever needed 10 on the US servers

Re: Astraweb
 

Hi there I’m new here also :)

I have just read a few comments on here so I thought I would like to let you know of a few things I have come across last December.

I have put a few friends of mine on Newsgroups and have had a few tell me there speeds have gone terrible too, 2 are on Newshosting and 1 on Giganews ... they are all on Virgin for their ISP the Newshosting problem was solved when I told them to change their port to 3128 but the Giganews problem was not solved until he signed up to the SSL package (which is what I am on at the moment and Virgin ISP).

So that in my eyes, is surely Virgin throttling Newsgroups, I don’t know why SSL is working as I have been on that for years and never have been throttled (not including the 5mb rubbish)

Re: Astraweb
 

I hope you've got thick skin mate..

Re: Astraweb
 

Astraweb, 50mb, 10 connections. Never misses a beat on the eu server. constantly maxes out even on older files. As Kymmy said earlier, for $11 a month i'm happy. :cool:

Re: Astraweb
 

And does their SSL service use a non standard port also?

Re: Astraweb
 

It's not throttling. Even if it were SSL would be an exercise is futility.

'Oh look we have customers opening 10 SSL connections to europe.news.astraweb.com - well that's ok we'll throttle NNTP but we'll leave those 50Mbps SSL connections alone, clearly not NNTP riding over SSL' ;)

EDIT: Just to show how fast and easy this would be, Giganews have this IP range:

Giganews, Inc. GIGAN-CIDR1 (NET-216-196-96-0-2)
216.196.96.0 - 216.196.111.255

So just shape everything there apart from the Giganews speedtest (Just allow the first say 10MB to go full speed and customer will get a realistic speed test)

Astraweb nearly as easy.

netnum: 91.208.207.0 - 91.208.207.255
netname: Searchtech
descr: Searchtech Limited

inetnum: 193.202.122.0 - 193.202.122.255
netname: searchtec-ams
descr: Searchtec


207.246.207.0/24
215.151.153.0/24

Re: Astraweb
 

Newshosting also uses 563 for their SSL my point was more aimed at that there standard ports: 119, 23, 25 and 80 did not go above dial up speed on virgin, except for when they chose port 3128

Giganews only lets you use ports 23, 80 and port 119 on the lower package and was also only getting slow speeds until he chose port 563

Re: Astraweb
 

The cynic would state that it is traffic shaping by VM, on the other hand the cynic could also say its a sneaky ploy by the news hosts to get you onto a more profitable package. :)

Re: Astraweb
 

It's extremely unlike that VM would shape traffic by port and even if they did they wouldn't rate shape port 80. If there's shaping it's not VM doing it.

Re: Astraweb
 

Strange thing for me is that using SSL connections on astraweb sometimes don't work in grabit, but at the same time work fine in Newsbin pro. And that is using the same servers and port.

Re: Astraweb
 

Astraweb seems to be working for me ok, i get the occasional drop out, but nothing annoying, speeds can fluctuate a little, i find running the servers through Alt Binz as secondary to the VM servers (for files out of the 7 day period) that speeds are not as fast configuring to just use the Astraweb servers.

Havent been hitting it hard alst few weeks though

and i did not go for the $11 a month deal, works out better for me to get a pre-paid package, and then use the VM servers for newer stuff, only relying on the Astraweb ones for older, and yes i always use the SSL servers from astraweb

Re: Astraweb
 

I am thinking of dropping these and going back to Giganews or at least testing them again to see if the retention is actually stable.

For me a lot of files over a few months old are not only broken but for some reason they only allow a couple of connections to them slowing the speed right down.

Ive tried all the servers secure and insecure different ports and different newsreaders. I have a feeling Astra are migrating older files to lesser servers in an attempt to keep up with giganews retention

Re: Astraweb
 

As said earlier, all i can comment on is my own experience with astra. As the image below proves, no issues here at all on 50mb and this shot was when downloading a file approx 12 months old.

Phil

Re: Astraweb
 

I have just submitted my cancellation and will be going with these instead.

https://www.supernews.com/signup/index.html


I have had enough of the slow speeds and corrupted files from Astra