What is Usenet?
How much bandwidth does the average website need? Is 15gb good for a small website?
Usenet is a whole mess of different discussion forums.
The amount of bandwidth a website needs depends greatly on two factors: its content and its popularity. Graphics and downloads use much more bandwidth than text-only HTML. For the typical personal webpage creator, 15 GB per month is probably more than sufficient. Large, heavily-trafficked sites, like the SDMB can easly use several hundreds of GB per month.
Usenet started back in the relatively early days of the internet. It was a way for developers to share news about what was going on. Over the years it has expanded dramatically so that now it contains groups for just about any topic imaginable. Functionally, it’s a lot like this message board. You can create a post about a certain topic, or you can reply to an existing one. Unlike the straight dope board, there is no central repository of usenet articles. Instead, there are news servers all over the world. If, for example, your internet provider happens to be Goobernet (a name I just made up… I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a real thing though) then the news server would likely be news.goober.net. Contact your ISP to find out the name of your news server, which you can then access through a program like Microsoft Outlook or some specific news reader (I always liked TRN).
If you make an article on the straight dope message board, it goes onto one computer and one computer only. If you make an article on usenet, it gets copied out to all of the millions of news servers out there.
There are two types of usenet groups. The first type is called the “big 8” which are the main heirarchies. It’s fairly difficult to create a newsgroup within the big 8 structure. You have to go through a fairly lengthy approval process during which you have to basically prove that there is a demand for your new group and also that it’s topic is not covered by some existing group. The second type of group is called the alt groups (for alternative). Anyone (as long as you have the right permissions) can create an alt group. The rules are significantly less restrictive. For this reason, many ISP’s don’t carry all of the alt groups, or they purge their alt archives more frequently, since alt groups take up a lot of space and don’t necessarily carry as much good information.
Generally speaking, once a usenet newsgroup is created it’s just about impossible to get rid of it later, so they are for all intents and purposes permenant.
The group news.announce.newusers is probably a good place to start.
Very true. For the typical personal webpage creator, 1 GB per month is probably more than sufficient.
Be careful of getting screwed by your hosting company though, I’ve seen hosts that try to charge $30 per gig or more, while I pay less than $1/GB of transfer (albeit for several hundred per month).
Where they really get you is in overages. If you exceed your monthly transfer allotment, the host won’t shut you down for the remainder of the period, like many freebie hosts will. Instead they charge you for the extra bandwidth usage, typically anywhere from $5 to $10 per gig. If your site suddenly becomes far more popular than you imagined, you could wind up being into your host for a lot more money than you had expected.