Easynews Reviews

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Editor's Rating
Overall
Features
Price
Customer Service

Positives

• Easy to use
• Good retention times
• Rollover data
• 100,000+ newsgroups
• SSL encryption
• Loyalty bonuses

Negatives

• No money back guarantee or refunds
• Classic and Plus plans are too limited
• A bit pricey

Having delivered some of the best Usenet services in the world for over 15 years, Easynews can be described as quite a philanthropic company since it contributes to a number of humanitarian institutions. In the same measure, this American company’s main goal is clearly to make the Usenet a friendly and easy-to-use tool that is accessible for all users. Easynews promises to be suitable for both the lighter users and the most demanding fans too. You have a choice between accessing Usenet through a newsreader or via their website with three plans available, and the one you pick will determine how extensive Easynews is. With this in mind, you’ll also have access to some of the industry’s best retention times, an additional free VPN subscription, a 14-day free trial, exclusive Android apps and much more from a company that also provides some of the best customer support and secure Usenet access.

Easynews Video Introduction

Features

To begin with, as we already mentioned, Easynews is surely one of the top Usenet providers in the world. While using its services you’ll be able to access over 100,000 newsgroups and, if these are not enough, you can even report directly to the company and ask for any you’d like to see get added.

Choose Your Access

Starting with the basics, with Easynews you can choose how you want to start accessing Usenet: either via NNTP or HTTP connections. The first option will require a proper newsreader, and if you’re at a loss as to which reader to use you can pay a quick visit to Easynews’s website to pick from some of the suggested ones. If you choose this method you’ll need to create a corresponding email so you can post the content you want. But if you’re looking to take cues from the company’s name and make every single step as easy as possible then all you need is to create an account and log in to the company’s website. Once done, you’ll be accessing Usenet automatically via HTTP and you can start searching for files immediately. Furthermore, choosing this method will also give you the ability to manage your account’s information, check usage, the status of available VPN servers and much more within your member’s area.

Useful Features

One of the best characteristics of Easynews is the extended features it holds up its sleeve. Regardless of whether you’re looking for video, audio, images or any other type of content, all your searches include a preview of the results, which is a great way to save some GBs downloading the wrong results. However, the company hasn’t forgotten those that like to download several files and has provided a nice zip manager tool, which holds up to 10 slots of queued zips and allows you to add up to 5,000 files or 2GB to download at once.

Since this can be quite heavy on your bandwidth and may well trigger the alarms at your ISP’s headquarters, you can opt for a different Easynews port (port 81) as well as make use of the VPN provided for free with the Big Gig plan, whether you’re on Windows or Mac.

Last but not least, there are also two apps called EZ Usenet and EasyBrowser that will let you access Usenet from your Android mobile device. However, note that these are only offered by third parties.

Network

Fortunately, Easynews doesn’t rent or resell any third party servers, which means the company runs its own, ensuring there is a 99% uptime. In addition to the maximum 3,118 days of article retention they hold, all memberships are allowed up to 60 connections to access all of the 100,000+ newsgroups. However, while there are no restrictions on the number of locations from which you can connect, you may not do so when connecting using multiple IP addresses at the same time. Servers are located in North America (East and West) and Europe in the company’s server farms. Outside of this, Easynews also includes a VPN network across 17 countries between North and South America, Europe and Asia.

Privacy Protection

Privacy and security are some of the most important aspects of Easynews. It’s because of this that the company adheres to a no-log policy, ensuring that none of your information is ever sold to any third parties. All subscribers utilize SSL connections when accessing Usenet too, whether via NNTPS or HTTPS. In addition, it is important not to forget the free VPN that Big Gig users get. While using it, Easynews clients are protected by two layers of security, through both the AES 256-bit encryption and the NAT Firewall that blocks all traffic that wasn’t initiated by users. Also, Easynews’s VPN supports OpenVPN (TCP and UDP), PPTP and L2TP protocols.

However, Easynews won’t tolerate any abuse and states that it bans users who repeatedly cause the company to receive DMCA strike notices.

Pricing

As we already mentioned, Easynews is suitable for everyone and with this in mind the company gives you three plans for you to choose from: Classic, Plus and Big Gig. The last one is the most complete, aimed at the most hardcore Usenet fans. This is because it offers access to its VPN for free, includes full web retention time (2,705 days), unlimited NNTP access for free, a maximum of 3,750GB of data rollover for the following month and even an extra 12GB for each year you remain subscribed on top of the already nice 150GB of web data transfer. For all this, Big Gig is unsurprisingly the most expensive plan, billed at $29.94 per month, yet still remains the best value available, considering what is on offer.

The other two plans seem more affordable in the short-term, but they also include quite heavy restrictions. In fact, all the aforementioned features are greatly reduced when compared to Big Gig – web data transfer, for instance, is limited to 40 and 20GBs in the Plus and Classic plans respectively, more than half of Big Gig. In the same measure you’ll also have to pay an extra fee if you want more web retention, as well as $2.99 for use of the VPN or $9.95 for unlimited NNTP access. The Classic plan is the cheapest one with a monthly cost of $9.98 while Plus is billed at $14.97 per month. However, despite how limited these two plans are, if you’re just taking your first steps into the world of Usenet they may well be enough for you.

Easynews accepts payments from credit cards, PayPal or via postal mail and also offers a 14-day free trial on all accounts and plans. It’s important to note that users are limited to 10GB of data transfer with this free trial, so be careful not to exceed it or you’ll be billed according to the plan you chose to test. Use this time to learn as much as possible about the service since, if you decide to invest any money, there are no money back guarantees or refunds.

Finally, there’s also a nice referral program that can grant you one of two perks: either triple your download limit or earn free months.

Customer Service

With Easynews there’s no shortage of ways you can contact the company. Although a live chat would be a nice addition, should you want to see your problem resolved as quickly as possible then your best shot will be by visiting the very detailed FAQ page, as all our questions were answered there. However, you can always opt for submitting a ticket or posting a public question in the forum, and in case you’re looking for any video tutorials make sure you pay a visit to the Easynews 101 page where you’ll be taken to these guides. And if you want to be updated with the latest news on VPN and Usenet related articles, simply visit any of the company’s social media pages (Facebook, Twitter and Google+) where you’ll find all the info that is also posted on their blog.

Bottom Line

Easynews truly lives up to its name. It is clear the effort the company has put into making everything as simple as possible since all it takes to start using Usenet is to simply log into their site. We cannot help but praise companies who give as much liberty as possible to their customers and, alongside a fairly high range of extra features, the fact that you’re allowed to choose between NNTP or HTTP to access Usenet is definitely good news.

Also worth mentioning is that you’ll be automatically using SSL with whichever of the two you use. You can try out all of this during a 14-day free trial that you can take advantage of. On the other hand, Easynews is not perfect since it is rather unfortunate that Classic and Plus plans are so limited, especially considering that such limits don’t come with an equal price reduction, ultimately becoming a bit too expensive even for the lighter users. Yet despite this disappointment, Easynews still without a doubt delivers one of the best Usenet services in the industry for all kinds of needs.