HITNEWS

A full-speed tier with 50 SSL connections on the Abavia backbone, and no throttled entry plan hiding underneath the advertised price, which is worth more than a headline figure. Our Amsterdam bench held 800 to 822 Mb/s once past the ramp: steady, unremarkable in the best sense, and again bounded by the Atlantic if you are pulling from North America rather than by anything HitNews is doing.

Advertised at 3,100+ days, or roughly eight and a half years. That is mid-pack: comfortably enough for anything current, and short of the UsenetExpress and Omicron deep archives by several years. Keep the distinction in mind. Retention is the depth of the spool, not the completeness of it, and a shallower archive that returns everything it holds beats a deep one that misses. Inside its window HitNews holds up well. Outside it, the article has aged out rather than gone missing, which is a different problem with a different fix.

Abavia is a real backbone with real hardware in the Netherlands, and HitNews is an established operator on it rather than a brand reselling a brand, which is what this axis is measuring. The practical note is the same one that applies to every family here: XS News and Frugal Usenet’s primary feed sit on Abavia too, so those three are not redundancy for each other. Against a UsenetExpress or Omicron primary, though, Abavia is genuinely different infrastructure, which is precisely the job a second account exists to do.

Claimed at 99%+. In our checks current material came back whole and older posts completed inside the advertised window without drama. Completion is the share of requested articles that actually arrive; beyond the retention window the failures you see are not completion failures at all, because the article has expired rather than vanished. The distinction decides whether you should be blaming your provider or buying a second one, so it is worth getting right.

A single Amsterdam core reached via news.hitnews.com and ssl.hitnews.com on 563 or 443, with 50 connections. One farm, honestly described, rather than a wall of hostnames pointing at the same hardware. SSL is enforced across every plan instead of offered as an option, which quietly removes the most common self-inflicted mistake in Usenet setup: the plaintext connection somebody left on in 2019.

EU only. No US point of presence and no APAC, so North American users pay setup latency on every connection they open. This is the axis that keeps HitNews out of the top three. Read the other way, it is exactly why it works so well as the second account behind a US primary rather than as the primary itself. IPv6 is not documented.

Dutch notice-and-takedown jurisdiction with GDPR, and 256-bit SSL enforced on all plans. NTD is a meaningfully different regime from US DMCA: takedowns run through a defined notice process rather than automated systems, and GDPR gives you real rights over your own account data. The usual boundary still applies. That is transport encryption plus a favourable jurisdiction, not anonymity, and no provider on this board is selling you the latter no matter how the landing page is worded.

None bundled, and none advertised. The score reflects an absent feature rather than a flaw in the service: your NNTP connection is encrypted either way, and a VPN’s job is hiding the existence of that connection from your ISP, not protecting its contents. If that is on your list, budget for a standalone VPN rather than shopping for a Usenet plan that happens to include one.

The broadest payment sheet here alongside NewsDemon: Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover, PayPal, iDEAL, SEPA bank transfer and Bitcoin. Advertised August 2026: from €6.25/mo on a committed term, with non-expiring blocks sold beside the unlimited plans so you can keep a fill account alive indefinitely without a subscription. No free trial. Check the renewal rate at checkout, because the entry figure is the committed-term price, not the month-to-month one, and those two numbers are rarely the same.