Smitty Two wrote:

I confess that this question - as well as the very existence of
stand-alone news servers - confuses me, because I thought all ISPs
provide usenet access as part of the package. Evidently I'm wrong, but
what's the whole story?

Discount ISP's don't include NNTP access, you either pay extra or
subscribe to outside specialist... Giganews, Newsguy, etc.

Full Usenet access can require lots of bandwidth, especially if you are
running your own NNTP servers (nearly 1200 gigs of traffic a day).
Unless you run a throttled server/feed (Charter's access to Giganews as
an example, 20kbps per connection with a max of 2) each user consumes
their entire bandwidth allotment during each NNTP session (pulling
headers or download message bodies) which uses massive amounts of inside
bandwidth as well...

If you want to archive 10 days of Usenet messages (text and binary) then
you'll need in excess of 12 terabytes of harddisk space...

http://newsadmin.com/top100bytes.asp
http://www.newsadmin.net/feedbytes.htm