Easynews

This post is also available in: Nederlands (Dutch)

Easynews offers a fairly unique service. There is a somewhat peculiar selection of packages, with widely varying prices. The retention times for some packages may also raise some eyebrows. In addition, downloading with Easynews is probably different than with many other Usenet providers. Downloading is done via the Easynews website, where they have a special section for members that functions as a newsreader. What’s the deal with Easynews exactly, and what do you have to pay attention to?

Easynews subscriptions and price

You can only choose packages with a one-month duration at Easynews. There basically are 3 choices:

• Classic: For $ 9.98 you have a data limit of 20 GB per month. The retention is below par, with 365 days, but by paying an extra fee you can increase this to 2900+ days. It is also possible to remove the data cap by adding an extra $ 9.95 per month. And you can add a VPN option for a couple of dollars per month extra.
• Plus: Compared to the classic plan you have a bit more data (40 GB instead of 20 GB). The retention time of files is increased to 525 days (which is still pretty bad, frankly).
• Big Gig: With the Big Gig Plan you are boosted to 150 GB of data per month and a retention of 2962 days. The VPN option is automatically included for the Big Gig Plan. And you will be able to use a mind blowing 60 connections.

There some features which apply to all packages:

• Free trial: All subscriptions come with a free trial. This is a 14 day tryout period with a 10 GB download limit. After these 14 days, or when you have used 10 GB of data, the paid subscription will be activated.
• Rollover gigs: When you don’t use all your data in a certain month, your remaining data is added to your data limit of the consecutive month. This means you will have more data available for downloading the next month. You can transfer up to 500 GB of rollover data to future months.
• Loyalty program: For every year you are a member at Easynews, your data limit is increased. This varies from 1 GB extra per month for the Classic Plan, up to 12 GB of extra data per month for the Big Gig Plan.

Easynews configuration

Downloading made easy with the Easynews web interface

Once you have an account with Easynews, you have access to the ‘Members area’ on the Easynews website. This members area is basically a big search engine for movies and videos in your browser. It works very simple. You enter a search query and get a list of results, including images of the relevant film or video and information about the file (size, resolution, playback time). Because of the way of presenting it is clear that Easynews focuses on users who like to download videos, music and images, but of course you can download all kinds of files. By simply clicking on the desired title the download will start.

It’s not even necessary to extract, repair, or use external software. The downloaded file ends up in your download folder and is ready to view without additional hassle. This makes Easynews very suitable for less technically advanced users. If you’re new to Usenet, this might be a good option.

Downloading with the Easynews NNTP

It is also possible to use an external newsreader, such as SABnzbd, to download with Easynews. In that case you don’t use the web interface, but you use your newsreader to download directly from the Easynews usenet servers. To do this, you will need the following server information:

Standard (suffices for almost everyone):

• News server hostname: news.easynews.com
• Ports: 563 (SSL) and 119 (non SSL)

With this information, 95% of users will be good to go. In case you still want to manually optimize your connection, then the following host and port data are important:

Europe:

• News server hostname (no SSL): news.eu.easynews.com
• Ports (no SSL): 21, 23, 25, 53, 80, 110, 119, 8000, 8080
• News server hostname (SSL): secure-eu.news.easynews.com
• Ports (SSL): 21, 23, 25, 53, 80, 110, 443, 563, 8000, 8080

United States of America:

• News server hostname (no SSL): news.us.easynews.com
• Ports (no SSL): 21, 23, 25, 53, 80, 110, 119, 8000, 8080
• News server hostname (SSL): secure-us.news.easynews.com
• Ports (SSL): 21, 23, 25, 53, 80, 110, 443, 563, 8000, 8080

IPv6 NNTP server:

• Europe (geen SSL): news6.eu.easynews.com
• Europe (SSL): secure6.news.eu.easynews.com
• VS (geen SSL): news6.us.easynews.com
• VS (SSL): secure6.news.us.easynews.com

Security and privacy Easynews

SSL and VPN

Similar to Newshosting and Tweaknews, Easynews offers 256-bit SSL encryption and a VPN service. The SSL connection ensures that your downloads are protected, while the VPN service protects and anonymizes your entire internet connection.

You can easily download the VPN software via the website. The interface is an old acquintance; we have seen the same interface before on Newshosting’s VPN service. In fact, both providers (Easynews and Newshosting) use the same VPN server network. This should not come as a surprise since both companies fall under the same parent company; UNS Holdings. To summarize, the Easynews VPN offers the following features:

• No data limits or speed limits.
• Available VPN protocols:  OpenVPN, L2TP and PPTP.
• More than 700 servers around the world. There are servers in North America, South America, Europea, Asia and Oceania.
• No user logs are kept.

Easynews VPN is very basic in every aspect, making it fairly easy to use. The server network is fine. We’ve been told Easynews and Newshosting use the VPN network of a large tier-1 VPN provider for their VPN service. There is some secrecy surrounding which VPN provider this might be, but users can rest assured that the VPN servers are fast and stable. And of course, download traffic is supported, including peer-to-peer traffic (for downloading torrents).

We ran several speed tests with Easynews VPN. We experienced almost no speed loss while downloading.

Which information does Easynews store about users?

Easynews has published an openly accessible privacy statement on the website. The take-home message after reading their privacy guidelines can be summarized as follows:

• Easynews does not keep any user logs (for both HTTP activities and NNTP activities).
• No user information is exchanged with third parties.
• Users don’t receive unwanted e-mails from Easynews.

Easynews indicates they have the right to share information when there is a legal obligation to do. At the same time there is the knowledge of them not storing any user logs, so there won’t be much concrete information to hand over to the authorities.

Customer support Easynews

There is a FAQ section on the website, allowing users to also ask additional questions. The support team is available through a support ticket on the website. After submitting a support ticket you will receive an answer on your question by e-mail. We tested how long it would take, and within a couple of hours after filling in our support ticket we got a satisfying reply from Easynews’ support team in our mail. There is no live chat support, which unfortunately seems to be common practice among Usenet providers. Still, the current support system seems quite decent and effective for most users.

Speed Easynews

The speeds obtained when connected to the Easynews servers is absolutely fine. We managed to utilize the theoretical maximum speed of our internet connection whilst downloading via Easynews’ Usenet servers with a secure SSL connection. In everyday practice most users will not experience any speed limitations when using Easynews.

Conclusion: Is Easynews good?

Easynews is a fine Usenet provider, although we do feel it’s rather expensive. The relatively high price can be justified by the fact you gain access to the user friendly web application for downloading. Particularly for beginning Usenet users this could be a very welcome option. More advanced Usenet users will often prefer their own trusted newsreader software though.

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