Best of the ISP-Lists

What Would You Pay For News?

Members of the ISP-Linux list discuss news servers. Although some subscribers love them, they're a headache to manage. What's the correct balance between customer satisfaction and rising costs?

[May 24, 2002]

On the ISP-Linux list in April, VB inquired,

"What are everyone's opinions on having a news server? We are using Supernews, but it costs about $100 a month for five simultaneous connections. I can get news downloaded from my upstream carrier for $50 a month, but then I have to administrate, use bandwidth, etc. Should I be looking at another option, or am I better off sticking with what I have?"

A number of respondents warned against trying to do it yourself:

[WD offered] "I would avoid managing your own news server like the plague, unless you have an experienced news admin and 500 active news-reading users. I managed a news server a few years back, and after monitoring its utilization and admin time, I found that I was spending 2-3 hours per day maintaining it and we were dedicating a rather large server for it. But the kicker was that out of our 1000 or so users, there were only six using it. To provide that service, it was costing us an $8,000 server and $375 a month in labor for a service we weren't charging extra for, for six dialup customers paying $24.95 a month!"

[PS added] "The hardware itself is definitely the worst part: a decent news server typically costs in the $40,000 to $100,000 range, if you want fast drives and redundancy. Depending on your choice of software, you could be in for a big chunk of change there as well. Don't get me wrong: I love working around news servers, and am a big believer of having them in-house—but only if your system is large enough and has enough users to justify the cost. One ISP I do some work for has about 15,000 customers, and never breaks five simultaneous users to the news server. That's far less than 1 percent of the users, even at peak times."

Others suggested that outsourcing is a great way to handle it:

[DI observed] "We feel that Supernews, in combination with NTTPCache, saves us money."

[DS advised] "You will not save money doing it yourself: you will be wasting so much bandwidth pulling down all that news, that you'll be spending more money on bandwidth than you pay Supernews. Plus, after getting all that news, only a small percentage of customers will even use it. Then there are the costs of operating the server. Outsourcing news groups is the smartest thing you can do."

[WD added] "Even larger ISPs outsource it, since it takes a very expensive person to really run a good news service."

— End