From: Andrew Coppin
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