I was wondering if Linode provides any usenet alt.binary archive'd feeds. are they fast? how do they compare with easynews?

Linode.com does not provide any usenet access. You'd need to access it from a news provider, free or otherwise.

-Chris

Do any of your uplink providers ie the planet or he.net provide one? this is a major selling point to me.

HE does, but for a couple hundred bucks a month (obviously intended for resell). I'm currently not very willing to do that, since for end users there are better options.

ThePlanet doesn't look like they provide free (or for a fee) Usenet access.

-Chris

do you know of any free ones that offer semi archived alt.binary feeds?

I think the days of free binary usenet feeds are behind us. My ISP uses a fifteen machine cluster with 6 TiB of disk for their binary news server and they still have to exclude the really high traffic groups (alt.binaries.cd.*, alt.binaries.dvd.* and the like) to keep it manageable. How can anyone do that for free?

_________________
/ Peter

Not free and I haven't tried it myself but this seems a pretty good deal depending on how much data you want per month.

http://www.forteinc.com/apn/index.php

The free accounts are limited to 5 MiB per day. Otherwise it's $9.95 per month.

_________________
/ Peter