A news server is a machine that stores all of the messages for the newsgroups that it carries and communicates with other news servers to send and receive new messages. Each news server is at least one computer that has enormous storage capacity - keeping all of the messages around that contain files (encoded into thousands of lines of text each) takes up a tremendous amount of space. This leads us to a term you should get to understand : Retention

This explains how retention times get set for different newsgroups. On each news server the administrator will determine the retention for each newsgroup usually by allotting it a certain amount of hard drive space. So alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.classical (a relatively busy newsgroup receiving 100's of songs a day) will have a longer retention than alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.complete_cd (an extremely busy newsgroup receiving 1000's of songs a day). An easy way to tell what the retention is for a newsgroup is to look through the list and see when the oldest messages are from. If all the messages are from the last three days, then the retention is about 3 days!

Completion is another term that you should get to know, when it comes to news servers you want to know it's speed, retention, and completion rate. The completion rate is a percentage based on how many messages there are for a file and how many the server actually received. In plain english, it is the percentage of how many files actually are complete and available for download. A file may have 100 or more text messages that make all the data for the file, if any of these messages are missing then the file must wait to either get the missing data from a repost or through the use of PAR/PAR2 files. The higher the completion rate (eg. 95%) the more messages are getting through and the fewer files are not available due to missing parts. This is crucial, any seasoned newsgroup user knows the enormous difference between a listing that is destroyed by missing parts and a wonderful server that has almost perfect completion and the experience is sooo much better.

Most ISP's maintain a news server that they allow their subscribers to access. Some are very good servers carrying most newsgroups and have high completion rates. Completion is simply the percentage of messages that make it to the server (low completion means a server is missing a lot of messages making downloading very difficult). The problem is that many ISP's neglect their news server and therefore have low completion rates. There are, however, many ISP's that have wonderful servers running - fast and high completion rates. The only way to know is to find out what the address of your ISP's news server is and try it out!

A news server may require you to log into it using a user name and password. Usually the news servers run by ISP's do not require you to log on using a user name and password because they assign you your IP address (your unique internet location address) and the server automatically accepts only those IPs it recognizes.

To find out if your ISP has a news server and to find the IP address go to the customer support section of their website and search for "news server" or "nntp". If their website doesn't help, give them a call and ask whether they have a news server and what the address is. Bargain ISP's (such as Netzero and Juno) generally do not maintain news servers.

There are many reasons for deciding to use a news server that you have to pay to access. You may have an ISP that doesn't have a news server. Your ISP may have a news server, but it isn't worth much because it's slow, or has a low completion rate, or doesn't carry the binary newsgroups. You may have a relatively decent news server and want a cheap news server that you can access that can fill in the missing files from your normal news server. Whatever your reason, these servers can be GREAT to awful. Usually in this market, as most, you get what you pay for. And most times you can get what you need at a reasonable price. When you sign up for one of these services they will tell you what the name of the server(s) is and issue you a user name and password that you must enter into the news reader.

The next page of this guide has a listing of premium usenet server providers.