THUNDERNEWS

Gigabit reported, and the bench agrees within the limits of our line: about 905 to 921 Mb/s on 60 SSL connections once the ramp finished, then flat for the rest of the pull. Fifty connections is the documented ceiling on standard plans. Worth naming plainly: because ThunderNews rides the UsenetExpress spool, what this axis measures is largely UE’s hardware with ThunderNews routing in front of it. That is fine. It is also the reason the two scores sit so close together.

Advertised at roughly 5,700+ days, which is genuinely deep, with an asterisk ThunderNews has earned itself. Its own FAQ says 4,451 days while checkout shows 5,763 to 5,835. That is not a rounding difference; that is two departments who have not spoken in a while. The higher figure is consistent with the UsenetExpress hybrid archive underneath it, so it is probably the live one. We publish it as advertised and flag the conflict rather than quietly picking the flattering number. Checked August 2026.

ThunderNews is a reseller. That is a description, not an insult, and resellers are often cheaper and better supported than the operator. But it means there is no infrastructure of its own behind the brand. Its spool, its retention and its outages are UsenetExpress’s. That lack of independent redundancy is the single reason ThunderNews does not rank higher here. It also means buying it alongside UsenetPrime, TheCubeNet or NewsgroupDirect stacks the same network under two names and two invoices.

Claimed at 99%+, and the UE archive underneath it is a strong one. Completion is the proportion of requested articles that actually arrive; retention only tells you how far back the server bothers to keep them, which is why a provider can score well on one and badly on the other. In practice current binaries came back whole in our checks, and older material behaved exactly like the UsenetExpress backfill it is: reliable, occasionally slow off the mark.

US and EU endpoints, including dedicated secure.us and secure.eu hostnames, on 563 and 443 with 80 and 81 also cited. One caveat worth naming: at least one source reports the hostnames are only handed over after signup, which is a strange thing to withhold from someone deciding whether their firewall will even allow the connection. The set in the server settings card was verified August 2026. Remember these are access endpoints into UsenetExpress farms, not farms of ThunderNews’s own.

US and EU, auto-routed or chosen by hand. No APAC entry point and no documented IPv6. There is a UK-specific annual tier of 200 GB with VPN that works out cheaper than the US equivalent if you are billed in sterling and do not need unlimited, which is a rare instance of regional pricing working in the customer’s favour.

ThunderNews has the plainest no-monitoring statement in this category: it records bytes transferred, not which groups you read or which articles you download, and discloses only under legal requirement. That is a good, quotable position and it is why this axis scores well. Keep the boundary clear, though. 256-bit SSL is transport encryption. It hides the traffic from your ISP; it does not make you anonymous to the provider or to a court order, and US jurisdiction means DMCA processes apply. The weak spot is not the privacy policy but the corporate paperwork: ownership is not publicly disclosed.

OctaneVPN, bundled on the VPN plan tiers rather than on pure Usenet or block accounts. Read the plan name before you buy, because the cheaper tiers do not include it. And bundled is not automatic: it is a separate application you install and switch on, and it does nothing for you sitting unused in an account dashboard. Your NNTP session is already encrypted; the VPN’s job is hiding that the session exists at all.

Cards, PayPal and WorldPay. Crypto appears in one third-party source and not on the site, so treat it as not verified. Advertised August 2026: about $9.99/mo unlimited, $12.99/mo with VPN, or $72/yr at an effective $6/mo, with a promotional annual seen around $30, roughly $2.50/mo. Blocks run 25 GB to 1 TB and do not expire. There is no prominent free trial or refund window, which is a real gap when the annual promo asks for a year up front. Community reports of soft caps on the unlimited plans persist and are not confirmed by the provider.