Eweka is a Usenet newsgroup provider based in the Netherlands that has gained recognition for its high quality and many consider it as the best provider available in Europe. Ewka focuses on offering high speed unlimited Usenet access. It uses its own 600 gigabits/s network. Overall, Eweka is a top-performing service that comes with great features, including a free VPN subscription to add security and flexibility to your online experience. We’ll find out more about Eweka in this review.
Pricing
There are two Usenet Access plans available with Eweka. The “Usenet Access” plan is the basic option and it offers unlimited Usenet access. There are no limits to how much you can download and the download speeds can go up to 50 Mbits/s, which should be more than enough for most people. This plan costs €7.50 EUR. If your broadband connection is very fast, the 100 Mbit/s package known as “Featured Plan” would be ideal. This plans is available for €9.60 per month. You can pay per month or pay for 90 days in advance. In the latter case, you receive additional features including an automatic upgrade to the 100 Mbit/s Featured plan and a free VPN account.
The free VPN that you get with Eweka is from IPVanish, one of the most reliable and effective solutions available. While downloading content via Usenet is safer than downloading via BitTorrent, a VPN offers useful additional security, even for Usenet. When you use a VPN with Usenet, your ISP can’t detect your Usenet activities and it won’t be able to throttle your internet connection. This is why it is great news to see that Eweka includes a VPN service, particularly one as good as IPVanish. With IPVanish you cna enjoy amazing speeds for streaming, downloading and playing games. In addition, IPVanish offers strong security and it doesn’t keep any logs.
In addition, Eweka offers a free trial that allows you to try the service for 7 days. Just make sure that when you are signing up, you check that you are actually getting the free trial and not a monthly subscription. If you select a paid option instead of the free trial, you can reach the customer support team to get the 7-day free trial. It is also worth noting that the trials are limited to one per IP address. You can pay using PayPal, credit cards, iDEAL and bank transfers. Users in the Netherlands can pay for an instant account by SMS text message, which provides 24 hours of access for €1.10 in addition to their mobile provider’s fee. One downside of Eweka is that it doesn’t support anonymous payment methods like Bitcoin.
Features
Apart from offering unlimited downloading, Eweka features a full newsgroup search with uncensored access to more than 125,000 newsgroups. It offers 2,652 days retention, which is much more than what you get with other Usenet service providers. Eweka claims to have a message completion rate of over 99.5% and based on the feedback from users and the solid reputation that the provider has, this figure seems to be accurate.
Eweka allows up to 8 connections per account. Even if you are not using the free IPVanish offer that they offer, you can enjoy strong security since all connections are protected using 256-bit SSL encryption. When it comes to the privacy policy, Eweka states that it respects its customer’s privacy and that the only logs that are kept are related to connection data and not to the content that is downloaded by a specific users. In terms of posting, they log what message IDs were posted by which IP/User and the time when it was posted.
How does it work?
When you are signing up for Eweka, you will be asked to provide an email address. Although you could use a temporary email address for the registration process, since there are no anonymous payment methods supported at the time, this wouldn’t make a big difference. There are over 100,000 newsgroups available and downloads are generally very fast. Eweka doesn’t have its own Usenet newsreader software so you need to choose and configure your own Usenet newsreader client. All you need to do is to enter the settings that Eweka sends you by email.
Conclusion
In spite of some flaws, Eweka is a fantastic Usenet provider that offers great value for money, considering the features supported and the fact that it includes a leading VPN service for free when you pay in advance. If you are not familiar with Usenet, it may be a bit more challenging to deal with the fact that there is no custom Usenet reader client. However, experienced users will be glad to have the chance to use the software that they prefer. If you are looking for a good quality Usenet provider in Europe, Eweka is an option that deserves to be considered. Thanks to the 7-day free trial, you can test it and discover all that it can do for you.