Thus spake "Greg Boehnlein" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
I came to much the same conclusion several years ago, when we finally
decommissioned our NNTP Servers and out-sourced the service to an
outside company. Running an NNTP server was a full-time job, and the
500 or so people that used it didn't generate enough revenue for us to
continue managing it inside.
That seems to be consensus among ISPs: there just aren't enough users
today to justify the cost of hiring a full-time news admin, deal with
abuse and customer service issues, and pay for the storage space for
8TB/day of content.
OTOH, it might be doable if you didn't carry the alt.binaries groups;
those account for well over 90% of the bytes on usenet today, and
virtually all of the complainers. If your customers want the binaries
groups, you can easily point them to a dozen different commercial news
providers that do carry them -- and have the economy of scale needed to
turn a profit.
Another option is to run a caching-only news server, provided you can
find a willing upstream. This will save you most of the bandwidth if
you don't have many users, though again excluding binaries may be needed
to cut down on the whiney pirates.
(Besides, all the binaries on usenet are available via BitTorrent
somewhere anyways; NNTP does not make a good piracy protocol from a
technical perspective, only from an anonymity one)
S
Stephen Sprunk "God does not play dice." --Albert Einstein
CCIE #3723 "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the
K5SSS dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking
