Readnews is probably the biggest Usenet company you never heard of.

The company has roots back into the 80’s where it began as a regional ISP and developed its Usenet infrastructure as part of their offering. While at one time they even offered their Newsgroup service directly to the public, eventually, they focused all their energies on their Usenet services – offering them to other ISP’s and to Newsgroup resellers exclusively. Readnews does not offer individual accounts to end users. You can only access their back end servers through one of the resellers that buys access from them.

Readnews’s retention is almost identical to Highwinds and Giganews. Like the other two big providers, Readnews runs its own Network Operations Center that is staffed 24X7 and has overbuilt its infrastructure to handle user activity bursts. Like the other big three, they are connected to multiple backbones so they can easily keep most end user internet connections full to capacity. While it may not have all the redundancy that Giganews has built into its system, we feel more than confident that the infrastructure is as robust and trouble free as anyone else’s. One significant differentiator is that Readnews (and also Giganews) is able to index all the headers for alls its messages, so your newsreader software can see all the messages available on their server.

Readnews does not offer direct user Usenet accounts, however we do feel comfortable recommending at least one of their resellers who has been in the industry for many, many years and has a very good customer service history. A complete listing of their resellers can be found on our Newsgroup Server Back End Index page.