[Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Anthony Chaumas-Pellet]

From: Andrew Coppin <andrewcoppin at btinternet.com>

> Really? Most web servers will accept a connection from anybody. (Unless 
> it's *intended* to be an Intranet.) I'm not quite sure why somebody 
> would configure their NNTP server differently...

The scale of an NNTP server is simply a *lot* bigger than most web
servers, where you only need as much storage capacity and bandwidth as
you have content to offer.

Daily traffic on the whole of the Usenet takes up a few terabytes, and
you presumably want to store more than one day worth of Usenet
traffic. You also need to keep in sync with the other Usenet servers,
as you are not the sole provider of content.

So, NNTP servers need to be powerhouses if they hope to serve even
part of the Usenet, and they're closer to search engines than to HTTP
servers in terms of the resources required.

(For what it's worth, my ISP uses a high-end, dedicated NNTP provider
for their Usenet service. For a regular user, it actually costs more
to subscribe to that NTTP server alone than to my ISP. Unsurprisingly,
my ISP only authorizes its own users to access that particular
service.)

Anthony Chaumas-Pellet