Giganews
More info
- Released
- 1994
- Type
- Usenet provider
One of the big commercial Usenet providers — the kind of company that took over once ISPs stopped running their own news servers.
Founded in 1994 in Austin, Texas. Through the 1990s an NNTP server came bundled with every internet subscription, but traffic in alt.binaries grew to terabytes a day and ISPs bailed out one by one. What remained were paid specialists like Giganews, competing on retention, completeness and speed.
Retention is now measured in thousands of days, and nearly all the volume is binaries encoded with yEnc and indexed through NZB files. The text groups, once the entire point, are a rounding error. The company later spun off Golden Frog, which runs the VyprVPN service.