The Complete GigaNews Review That You Need to Read

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Giganews is one of the top Usenet service providers. Read on to find out how it stacks up against the competition.

Giganews, not to be confused with GigaFactory (which is Tesla’s revolutionary still-in-construction Lithium-ion battery factory and a completely different thing to Giganews. Obviously. But you already knew that didn’t you?), was formed in 1994 and since then has made tremendous strides to become one of the top Usenet service providers.

As of this moment in time, Giganews can boast about a lot of things. One of them is the fact that Giganews has managed to accumulate about 10 million users who reside in over 180 countries.

It has a software base that is supported in 10 different languages.

Moreover, Giganews is probably one of the few Usenet service providers that offer new users some extra features that combine really well with the company’s standard package.

Giganews is also a unique Usenet service provider in the sense that it also offers a VPN in most of its packages. Along with that Giganews provides a custom built Usenet browser along with a download accelerator.

Yes, you read that right. Giganews provides all of that and much more at no additional cost. Though some important things have to be mentioned about the packages that Giganews offers to new users.

Overall, Giganews stacks up rather nicely against the rest of the competition, but we’ll have to break the comparison down in terms of the retention period, security features, settings, extra features, customer support and intuitiveness of the app along with the package pricing in order to have more insight.

So let’s get to it.

Giganews Price

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Let’s get this out of the way from the start. Giganews offers five different plans which should be understood as five plans that belong to five different tiers.

We’ll get to the actual pricing in a bit but more importantly for those looking for a wide range of payment options, there is no candy for you here.

Giganews does not offer much in the way of payment options. Right now,the company only accepts payments made through either a credit card or a PayPal account. As you can imagine, that isn’t the best of situations for online users who want to remain anonymous and want to guard their privacy.

To put it another way, no Giganews does not offer payment options such as Bitcoin or any other third-party payment method for that matter.

Great. Since you’ve read this far, this means that you’re seriously looking at the possibility of paying up for Giganews with the help of your credit card or Paypal account.

Smart move.

Let’s move on.

The cheapest and the most basic Giganews plan starts at about $4.99 (which converts to about 3.69 British pounds at the time of writing) and is aptly named Pearl.

This basic plan allows users a total of 5GB worth of downloads every month. It also offers about 20 connections and 30 days of retention.

As you would have probably figured out on your own, the basic plan is not for a heavy downloader. The 5GB limit is atrociously low and the 30 day retention period isn’t that great either.

Well, let’s move on to some of the more advanced plans which might be able to satisfy the needs of users who like to download a lot of stuff from the internet.

The second Giganews plan, called Bronze, is basically an upgrade over the initial Pearl plan. It increases the download limit to 10GB per month and has the maximum available retention period which comes to about 2367 days.

The Bronze plan will cost you about $9.99 per month. If you live in the United Kingdom, though, you should expect to pay around GBP 7.40.

Moving ahead and we come to the Silver Giganews plan. This plan if a further upgrade over the Bronze plan.

The Silver plan from Giganews offers a decent 50GB download limit for a price of $14.99 per month. Upon conversion that comes to around GBP 11 if you live in the United Kingdom.

However, if you’re really looking to take your Usenet experience to another level then there is the Giganews Platinum plan for you.

The Giganews Platinum basically gives the user a free reign over download limit. In other words, there is no download limit when you subscribe to Giganews Platinum package.

No data cap and to top that off with another great feature, you also get to have a VPN service which costs around $19.99 per month. Again, for the folks in the United Kingdom, this should come to around GBP 14.80.

There is another plan as well. It’s called the Diamond plan. The Diamond plan allows users to use an additional 30 more connections. That takes the total number of usable connections to over 50. The Diamond plan also includes a VPN service and has no download cap.

Diamond plan can be had for $29.99 per month (GBP 22.20) but if you’re lucky enough you might be able to take advantage of one of their offers and get the Giganews Diamond plan for just $14.99 per month for the initial three months after you sign up for the service.

For our veteran readers, it might come as a surprise that Giganews is actually a bit more expensive that some of its competition in the Usenet service provider market in terms of cost-per-GB.

We’ll get to the factors why you should still sign up for Giganews Usenet service in the remaining of this review.

On the price front though, perhaps some of the users might feel more secure in signing up for Giganews service by knowing that Giganews also offers a 14-day free trial period for new users.

This trial period allows users to download 10GB of data per month and offers 20 connections in total. It also offers full retention period i.e well over 2000 days.

Giganews Retention Period and Security Features

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According to official sources, Giganews has about 120,000 newsgroups to bank on and offers a binary retention period of 2367 days.

However, if you’re only interested in text retention then you can further extend that retention period by up to two years or more.

Not only that but Giganews also guarantees its users a maxed out connection download speed. Official sources also claim that Giganews developers all of its server software on its own and hence is able to optimize its performance according to the user’s needs.

Moreover, Giganews also claims to offer 100 percent uptime and completion rate. Additionally, the company also says that it has a total of zero outages because of maintenance operations.

Of course, that is a pretty bold claim and there aren’t a lot of Usenet service providers out there in the market that can claim such lofty features.

In fact, we’ll go one step further and tell you that, there is not a single big-name Usenet service provider out there in the market that is ready to offer its users a 100 percent completion rate. Most of the tier-1 Usenet service providers only offer about 99 percent completion rate.

Which sounds more genuine, is something that will have to be decided by each user’s own judgment.

Comparitech reports that Giganews is a good enough Usenet service provider to hold true to its promises. The testers there also reported that they experienced just a single broken download throughout the duration of their testing and that too was probably caused by a DMCA takedown request rather than through a fault on Giganews side.

As far as the end-user is concerned, Giganews has the capability of regularly providing working download links that are well over a year old without any issues.

Moreover, Giganews has a pretty reasonable reputation on always offering its users maxed out download speeds.

As far as servers go, Giganews operates its own servers. The company offers different servers in four countries including the United States of America and Europe. It also manages servers in regions such as the United Kingdom and Netherlands.

However, Giganews itself is based in the United States of America and that makes the company rather susceptible to DMCA takedown requests on a regular basis.

Of course, the DMCA takedown requests only affect a certain type of content so it’s not really a reason for worry for most users.

But, for users who do want to stretch their rights when downloading stuff from Usenet service providers, it is always better if they sign up for a backup block account.

The backup block account should always be purchased from a different service than the primary one. In other words, don’t have both your Usenet accounts with Giganews.

Since Giganews is likely to face more DMCA takedown requests than some of the other top tier Usenet service providers, Giganews customers should opt for an additional account with a different tier-1 Usenet service provider such as Newshosting.

Potential Giganews customers would be glad to know that each Giganews account is compatible with Giganews’ in-house  Mimo Usenet browser.

The Mimo Usenet browser makes it pretty easy for new users to search for and then download NZB files from a single window in the form of a native desktop application.

Users who have had exposure to Giganews Usenet service before might recall that previously some Giganews accounts came with a free cloud storage service from Dump Truck which was a Golden Frog online product.

Well, let’s make it official here that Golden Frog has now discontinued its Dump Truck service and consequently, Giganews no longer offers free cloud storage with some of its accounts.

As far as security features are concerned, potential Giganews users would be glad to know that each user gets to engage in transfers that are 256-bit SSL encrypted.

That essentially means that when you download something using Giganews Usenet service, your downloads are protected from your internet service providers who might want to know what you’re doing on the internet. This also means that your interactions with Giganews Usenet service are safe from government organizations that are paranoid about what users are downloading from the internet.

Giganews Mimo Browser And Giganews Download Accelerator

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For new users, Mimo browser is basically a package that acts as an indexer, download manager and NZB creator for users who use Giganews Usenet service. This basically saves users a lot of time because everything can be done from one single convenient piece of software application.

Using the Mimo browser, Giganews users search for their desired files whenever they want to and the applications also allow them to sort out files by poster, size, age, name and specific newsgroup.

Moreover, users can also sort out files by minimum file size and age.

As mentioned before, by default, SSL is enabled for all Giganews users but more importantly, Giganews users also get to have the exclusive Giganews Accelerator which increases download speeds.

The Giganews Accelerator is also one of the features that is enabled by default in the Giganews app.

Additionally, users are allowed to bookmark their preferred newsgroups while novice users can look forward to all the new features including the old ones at one single convenient place.

The layout of the native app allows users of all experience levels to tweak related settings and that makes the task of setting up the newsreader along with registering an indexer much easier.

With that said, Mimo isn’t the perfect Usenet browser. We mentioned before that using Mimo browser users can sort out search results. That in itself is an extremely useful feature but the worse part is that you can’t sort files by their popularity.

So if you wanted to know which files have been downloaded the most times by other Giganews users, then sorry, you can’t know that information.

Why is that important?

Well, as is the case with shared posts and torrent files, the number of downloads can give a pretty good indication of the quality of the file and without this feature, it is near impossible to find genuinely good NZB files on a regular basis.

There is no file preview feature and that means you can’t know if a particular video is worth a download or not.

Moreover, when a file doesn’t download (gets interrupted or fails) the status of the file in the download manager does not change and instead remains in “pending” state. Ideally, the download manager should show an error message or some other type of alert.

If it wasn’t clear enough already, then know that the Giganews Accelerator is a built in feature of Mimo browser. But, in order to give more options to users, Giganews Accelerator can also be run separately from the main browser.

Users who want to use it separately can download the Giganews Accelerator from the official website and can then install it on their system.

After the installation process is complete the Giganews Accelerator needs to be configured on localhost port 119. That can be easily down through an existing newsreader application such as SABnzbd.

Users should know that by default the Giganews Accelerator SSL encrypts all traffic that passes through it on its own, so the SSL feature on any other newsreader application has to be disabled.

One the setup is completed, the relevant header files are compressed in order to give users a significant boost in download speeds.

Thankfully, the native application also has the built-in feature of speed limit if users want to save up some bandwidth for other tasks.

Giganews Very Own VPN Service

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By now, you should already know that if you sign up for the two most expensive Giganews packages then you get to have a free VPN service. The VPN service that is offered to the users is called VyprVPN which is a pretty well reputed VPN service.

This offer has been enabled by a partnership between Giganews and Golden Frog, which is the parent company of VyprVPN.

Believe it or not, but this partnership is pretty weird in one aspect. Which aspect?

Well, as many of you would know that VyprVPN has a reputation of kicking out users who use its VPN service to download torrents that have copyrighted content in them. It also tracks users by keeping a good amount of logs.

But, strangely enough, it supports Giganews and its users. Giganews users are notorious for downloading pirated content from the internet so VyprVPN’s position on this issue is unclear, to say the least.

To read the full review for VyprVPN go here.

But What About That 2014 Giganews FBI Thing?

Indeed what you have heard is true. Well, it depends, let’s rewind a bit to refresh our memories.

In 2014, a guy who had previously worked at Giganews, revealed to some reporters that Giganews was the subject of an operation carried out by the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation).

And since the news was leaked to many tech news websites, the news naturally spread like wildfire.

The name of the employee was Nick Caputo and he basically stated that the company instructed him to remove content that was related to child pornography from specific servers which were owned by another company by the name of Data Foundry.

Data Foundry is a data center company that has close ties to Giganews. Of course, he was rebuked and then forced to restore the content that was deleted from the servers. We all know what would have happened if he hadn’t done that right? Yeah, any company can get into some serious trouble for interfering with ongoing criminal investigations and Giganews is one of them.

Caputo also revealed to several tech news outlets that Giganews kept logs on its users and all content that was shared on Giganews servers first went through federal authorities.

The former Giganews employee also came up with a file dump that contained the list of current employees that were actually agents hired by the FBI.

Officially though, Giganews denies the whole story and has actually called it a hoax. The company also got rid of the file dump by taking advantage of DMCA takedown requests.

All this information does not affect how Giganews performs as a Usenet service provider but to make this review a just one, a mention of the scandal was a must.

Ideal Giganews Settings

These are the settings you should opt for in order to get optimal performance from the Giganews native app.

  • Ports: 443 or 563 for SSL and 23, 80 or 119 when SSL is disabled
  • Server: news.giganews.com

Readers should take note that if Giganews Accelerator is enabled then they need to change the settings for the server to “localhost” and the related port to 119 and have SSL disabled.

Giganews Customer Support

Giganews has a lot of features which most of the other top Usenet service providers don’t have or don’t dare to offer. One of those features is 24/7 live customer support and just for the record, it’s not just another tick submission system.

You can get a representative from the company on the phone in a matter of minutes. Of course, the quality of the communication with the representative is what counts and in that department, Giganews is a bit of a letdown.

On average, if you have a problem, it will take around a day for the company representatives to come up with a proper solution.

The official Giganews website has a dedicated knowledge base section along with a FAQ section and a documentation section.

Unfortunately, none of the three abovementioned sections are searchable which makes it rather hard to pinpoint what you’re looking for.

On the bright side though, users don’t get unsolicited emails or other advertisements when they sign up with Giganews.

Should You Buy Giganews Usenet Service?

If you’ve read the whole review, then you would already know that there isn’t one single serious flaw in Giganews as a Usenet service provider.

The 24/7 live customer support is certainly a big bonus over other Usenet service providers but the Mimo browser could use a bit of work.

Expect fast download speeds and a great completion rate percentage.

In fact, the only downside to Giganews as a Usenet service provider is that it is indeed expensive. More expensive than the rest of its rivals. You will pay slightly more for each amount of data on the dollar.

Out recommendation is that you should sign up for Giganews preferably during a special offer or a season sale.

SecurityGladiators is not responsible for the illegal use of any Usenet service provider. We do not support nor condone the actions that cause copyright violations or piracy. Always be on the right side of the law and have due consideration for the people that get affected because of piracy and other infringements.

Zohair A. Zohair is currently a content crafter at Security Gladiators and has been involved in the technology industry for more than a decade. He is an engineer by training and, naturally, likes to help people solve their tech related problems. When he is not writing, he can usually be found practicing his free-kicks in the ground beside his house.
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