NewsDemon.com was nice enough to give me a free account to test out their services. If you don't know what they do, they offer Newsgroup/Usenet services. Many of you have had their services cancelled, if you were on Verizon. This review compares News Demon vs. NewsHosting, which is given to Road Runner customers for free.

First, the main difference is payment. $11 per month for NewsDemon vs. free for NewsHosting (if you are on RR).
Another difference is data retention. While Newshosting offers 200 days, News Demon only has 110 days.

While these may at first seem to make a huge difference in picking News Hosting over News Demon, look further into the connections count. News Demon offers an amazing 20 connection limit, which dwarfs News Hosting of 4 connections. On average, I could download files at 700KB/Second with News Hosting, however with News Demon, the rate jumped up to 1780KB/sec. A huge difference if speed is what you are concerned with.

Setup was the same as any paid for service, where you register your email address and get a user ID and password sent to you. However, as of today, NewsDemon has a bug in their email, where instead of sending your user ID, it sends you the SQL field of p%memberid%. This was easily fixed by visiting their FAQ page, clicking on Forgot User ID, and having it sent to you.

Using a program called Picture Agent, I attempted to download the Newsgroup list, but sadly, the connection keeps being disconnected after getting 50% of the lists. However, I used Grab-It to fetch the list and it appeared to have downloaded the list completely.

Another plus for News Demon is that they offer encrypted sessions. If for some reason you have a want for it, you can get a SSL account for $22.99 per month. Their lowest rate is $8.99 per month with a 10GB limit. If you download movies frequently, this may not be the plan for you, as one movie can be 4 GB large.

Overall, I am impressed with News Demon. I won't be making the switch permanently just yet, but my overall initial impressions are positive.

Keep up the good work News Demon. If you want to sign up for News Demon, click here https://www.newsdemon.com/join-us.php