USENET.FARM

Unmetered and uncapped on its own Its Hosted network, with 50 SSL connections. Our Amsterdam bench settled around 844 to 862 Mb/s and held level across the pull, a shade under the US leaders. That gap is mostly the Atlantic rather than the hardware; from inside Europe it closes. There is no faster tier to upgrade into, which is a small mercy in a market that enjoys selling you your own bandwidth back one increment at a time.

Advertised at 3,000+ days, around eight years, and genuinely mid-pack. Usenet.Farm does not pretend otherwise, which counts for something on an axis where the industry does most of its creative writing. Retention is how far back the spool still holds articles; it is not completion and it is not quality. For anything current, three thousand days is comfortably more than enough. If you are chasing 2012 posts this is not the account that finds them, and the honest fix is a deep-archive provider alongside it, not a bigger plan here.

Usenet.Farm runs its own infrastructure on the Its Hosted network in the Netherlands: an actual independent, not a brand renting space on somebody else’s spool. In a category where four retail names commonly resolve to one set of machines, that independence is the whole reason this axis scores where it does. It is also what makes Usenet.Farm the single most useful second account for anyone whose primary sits on the UsenetExpress or Omicron families. Different hardware, different ingestion, genuinely different misses.

Claimed at 99%+, and the browser test panel is the best evidence any provider here offers: you can preview an article straight from the spool before committing a download to it. That is a completion check you run yourself, on the articles you actually care about, instead of taking a marketing percentage on trust. It is a small feature that quietly does more for buyer confidence than any number on this page, and more providers should copy it.

Its own NL core, reached through news.usenet.farm and news4.usenet.farm on 563 or 443, with 50 connections. Worth keeping the distinction straight: a server farm is physical hardware, an endpoint is just the door you knock on. Usenet.Farm has one farm and is straightforward about it, which is preferable to a long list of impressive hostnames that all terminate in the same rack.

EU only. No US endpoint, no APAC. From North America you are paying an ocean’s worth of latency on connection setup, which costs you ramp time rather than plateau throughput. The trace still flattens out; it just takes a second longer to get there. This is the axis that keeps Usenet.Farm out of the top three, and if every account you own is EU-based, geography is the gap your second provider should be fixing.

The strongest structural privacy case on this board, and structural is the operative word: it rests on jurisdiction and policy rather than on a banner. Dutch notice-and-takedown with GDPR, 256-bit SSL, minimal signup data, and a published fair-use policy instead of an unlimited plan with an undisclosed cap waiting inside it. Naming the limit in advance is a form of honesty the rest of this market could stand to try. As everywhere: SSL is transport encryption, not anonymity.

None, deliberately. Usenet.Farm’s position is that an NNTP session is already encrypted end to end and a bundled VPN is closer to a marketing line than a security upgrade, which is largely correct. A VPN hides that you are using Usenet from your ISP; it does not make the download itself safer. This axis scores low because the feature is absent, not because the reasoning is wrong. If you want a VPN, buy one from a VPN company.

Cards, iDEAL and Bitcoin, with barely any personal data required at signup, which is rather the point of the whole service. Advertised August 2026: from €7/mo, with short, cheap starter blocks if you would rather test the network before committing to a month. There is no free trial in the conventional sense, but a starter block does the same job, costs very little, and does not auto-renew into anything you have to remember to cancel.