NEWSDEMON

Fifty SSL connections with no documented per-plan throttle. Across the 28 July to 2 August bench window the US East endpoint cleared the handshake in about four seconds and then sat between 935 and 946 Mb/s for the rest of a sustained pull. A flat line rather than a spike, which is the shape that actually matters. That plateau is our gigabit test line running out, not NewsDemon running out. Read it as saturating whatever you give it rather than as a ceiling.

Retention is how far back the server still holds articles. It is not how many of them survive, which is completion, and not how fast they arrive. NewsDemon advertises 5,700+ days of binary retention and grows it daily, putting roughly fifteen years of Usenet inside reach. The caveat is housekeeping: its own pages quote 5,695, 5,798, 5,817, 5,828, 5,834 and 5,836 depending on which one you land on. Every one of those is a big number. None of them is the number. Checked August 2026.

A backbone is the network that actually ingests and stores articles; the brand on your invoice may or may not own one. NewsDemon markets full independence and has genuinely added hardware, but it historically resold UsenetExpress, and infrastructure maps still associate its deep archive with that family. We score it as an operator with hybrid lineage: its own spools in front, UE-linked transit behind. The practical impact is one line long. Pairing NewsDemon with a UsenetExpress reseller buys less redundancy than the two logos suggest.

Completion is the share of the articles you ask for that actually arrive, and it is the number that decides whether a repair succeeds or a download dies at 94%. NewsDemon claims 99% to 99.9%. Spot checks across recent and multi-year-old posts came back clean in our window, with older material taking a beat longer to start, which is what a deep-archive fetch looks like from the client side. No reviewer can audit a completion figure from outside, so treat every number on this axis, here and elsewhere, as a supported claim rather than a measurement.

Three claimed server-farm regions with full article replication between them: US East in Virginia, US West in California, and the Netherlands. Worth separating two things the industry enjoys blurring. A server farm is physical hardware, while an access endpoint is a hostname pointed at one. NewsDemon documents both, which puts it ahead of most of this board. What nobody can do is walk the datacentre floor, so three regions remains its claim: consistent with the routing we saw, not independently verified.

US East, US West and EU entry points, auto-routed from news.newsdemon.com or picked by hand if you would rather not hand your routing to geo-DNS. From the American interior the west-coast host trimmed connection setup noticeably; from Europe the NL host is the obvious choice. No APAC endpoint, and IPv6 is not documented. Both are gaps rather than failures, but gaps a global user will feel.

Post-quantum hybrid key exchange (X25519MLKEM768) layered over 256-bit SSL, which is an unusual thing to find on an NNTP port in 2026 and the reason this axis tops the board. Read it precisely, though: that is transport encryption. It stops your ISP reading what crosses the wire. It is not anonymity, and it says nothing about what the provider itself can see. On that second question the policy is good. There is no record of groups read or articles downloaded, the connection IP is kept for session management, posting is logged for abuse handling, and a warrant canary is referenced. Jurisdiction is US, so DMCA automation applies to the spool regardless.

SlickVPN, no-log, free on every recurring plan; block accounts get a one-month trial only. Bundled is not the same as automatic. It is a separate application you install and switch on, and your Usenet session is already encrypted without it. Its job is hiding that you use Usenet at all from your ISP, not making the transfer safer. As a free extra on a plan you were buying anyway, that is a fair sweetener. As the reason to buy, it is not.

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