sh3llCan usenet be used for free?
RandomLegendNo, and that's a good thing.
How should they make money? Services and Storage cost money. Period. That has to be paid by someone. Either be it the users, or some sketchy not-giving-a-shit-about-privacy-advertising company because hosters on the usenet have to sell your data to pay for the servers.
Easy as that.
And since usenet is used for a lot of piracy, i 100% DON'T want it to be financed by shit like this. I pay for it and i know i am safe.
Don't forget. If a product is free - you are the product.
xenosexactly this. I'm sure some of the larger hosts easily spend six figures per month just on the server infrastructure alone
Usenet is super fast, safe, reliable, automated searching and downloading actually works. I gladly support my host
AnAngryAlpacaAre they really? Usenet is from the 70s and build for text posts, which take less than 1kb of storage per Post. Modern Sites allow you to upload gigabytes of data for a few dollars per month. The cost for storage and traffic gas come down a lot
BigTiddyGothGFDoesn't really matter what it may have once been considering we're talking about using it to store and distribute large binaries of today. And yeah, six figures doesn't sound that far off the target when you consider the storage in petabytes and, more importantly, the bandwidth. Multiply that with redundancy and multiple locations in general and you'll easily hit six figures.