Re: uunet ends newsfeed/newsreader in US

["Justin M. Streiner" <streiner () cluebyfour org>]

On Fri, 30 Mar 2012, Joe Greco wrote:

> Oddly enough, I'd think that "bits on the wire" are kind of expensive.
> Ports, circuits, etc. and those are on routers you own and circuits you
> lease.
>
> I can pick up a 4TB hard drive for $229.  And that's currently an
> inflated price; back in September, 3TB drives were around $100.  With
> traffic rates steady around 6TB/day for the past few years, IIRC, it
> isn't too fantastically expensive to store two weeks of binaries.
> Certainly cheaper than your average Cisco router.

I would agree.  When I still worked for an ISP, we outsourced our way out 
of the NNTP business around 2001 or so.  Disk was much more expensive at 
that time, as was bandwidth.

While I was successful in the mandate I got from the CEO in 1997 ("Our 
news server sucks.  I want you to make it kick ass.") and got our feeder 
up into the 300 range on the Freenix top 1000, it became apparent pretty 
quickly that the amount of money we were spending on bandwidth to sling 
all of that NNTP traffic around the net, and the $$ we would've had to 
spend on a larger disk array to keep retention times on the warez/por--- 
er... 'alt.binaries.*' groups would have been impossible to justify.  Like 
most ISPs, we didn't charge a separate fee for access to the news server, 
so it was essentially a non-revenue service.  Sure, there were a very 
small handful of die-hard news users who bought their service from us 
solely because our news server was good, but there were not enough of 
those users to justify the continued expense of running it, so we got out 
of that game.

I think we outsourced to Remarq, or whatever their name was before it 
became Remarq, and as far as I knew, some of the die-hard users didn't 
know the difference, or didn't care enough to switch providers.

jms