On Tue, 5 Sep 2006, John van Oppen wrote:
we don't run one either... :)
The last person I know who was running one, was in the proccess of killing it.
I used to run one, but haven't, since about 2000 :) The provider i worked
for at the time got out of the game and outsourced news because otherwise
we would have needed to dump a lot of money into disk space to keep people
from bitching about the sub-24 hr retention times on alt.binaries.$VICE :(
That was the blessing and the curse of cyclical filesystems, I guess :)
On the plus side, Highwind's news server software just flat-out ran -
never gave me a single problem in the 3 years I ran it. That plus a
separate box running diablo to manage the feeds was a winning combination
:)
More and more people are outsourcing news because providing good news
service requires tons of disk space and loads of network bandwidth, i.e.
it costs a lot of money to operate, and for many providers, it doesn't
make any money.
The last time I looked at newsfeed stats, a full feed with all the
alt.binaries crap was running around 350 GB/day - I wouldn't be at all
surprised if it's substantially higher now.
jms