I have been doing torrents + VPN for years now and thinking about switching.
Is usenet and debrid safe to use without a VPN in the UK? What about other piracy streaming sites?
From what I understand it's cheaper to use a VPN than have debrid + usenet + private indexers but I am not sure.
I have heard some questionable justifications as to why it's safer such as it being encrypted (torrents can also be encrypted). Are the index sites also safe? I have heard it both ways about this. Including people saying index sites are not encrypted which they normally are.
If your internet isn't great then it won't be much better for you vs torrents.
I get 1 gbps and my usenet host can fully saturate my download speeds.
My usenet host retention is currently over 5000 days. Most downloads that fail are because of DMCA takedowns. In those cases, 99% of the time, Sonarr or Radarr will find another one still under the same provider. It's only when all of those fail that it'll turn to torrents.
I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to use torrents in the past three years.
I've seen torrents easily saturate 350 Mbps connections. Speed is actually one of the advantages of bittorrent protocol and has inspired things such as Windows peer to peer update feature.
I've actually been having problems with downloads from an indexer (nzbplanet) that don't download. I wonder if I have something configured wrong. I am not sure how to tell an indexer site what provider and backbone I am on.
A usenet download can either fail due to being taken down after a DMCA or similar request, not being in one of the newsgroups cached by one's usenet provider, or because one's usenet provider has fewer days of retention than the age of the usenet release. In terms of telling a binary newsreader program (i.e. downloader) such as SABnzbd or NZBGet what your provider is, there's a page in the settings of those and similar applications to enter the domain name, port, username, and password associated with any usenet provider subscriptions and/or block plans you have.
I maybe wasn't clear. I have SABnzbd setup with the provider correctly (got it to download one file I found successfully). What I mean is can I set the indexer websites to only show stuff that's avaliable from my backbone as I only have one usenet provider on the Omicron backbone.
Unfortunately as most usenet indexers aren't usenet providers or vise versa, as far as I know there isn't a way for indexers to know which backbones have cached a given release or not. If any are able to deliver that it would be Easynews, which is both an indexer and provider, but even then that would just be for releases indexed by Easynews itself.