What is a Block Account

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What is a Block Account

There's traditionally two ways of paying for Usenet access. A normal account where you pay either monthly or yearly for a set amount of access (usually unlimited) or a Block Account where you buy a 'bulk' chunk of data for a one time fee. A block account does not auto renew, usually doesn't expire and just sits there as a backup for when your normal accounts can't find something. With a block account, you buy a new one when the old one runs out.

Why we recommend a Block Account

Typically, people will use a standard Usenet account from a provider on one backbone and a block account on another backbone to improve reliability and availability, the block account only gets used for pieces of the file not available from your primary server when set up to do so.

Priorities

In software like SabNZBd+ or NZBGet you can set priorities for your servers. This is especially important when using a Block Account. For priorities the lower the number the higher the priority.
It's best to set your best provider (on a normal plan) to Priority 0, next best to 1, etc. and after you've done ALL of them, set your Block Account to an even higher number. Doing this will mean that your downloader will attempt all of your "Unlimited" accounts before wasting your Block Account and only grab from the Block when it's not available elsewhere.