A chaining system for Usenet applications allows local Usenet servers having a relatively small storage capacity to provide access to a large number of articles through network connections with large-capacity storage devices. The local servers can thereby advertise the availability of the union of its own stored content and the content stored on the large-capacity storage device. Chaining can be accomplished with and without-caching. In addition, the chaining system of the present invention allows storage devices to be staged throughout a network so that the most requested Usenet articles are available on fast, local servers, thereby freeing larger storage devices to hold greater numbers of less-popular articles. The larger devices may be shared among several local servers. The overall system performance is enhanced because the load on storage devices can be advantageously balanced, with the fastest (and typically smallest) storage devices absorbing the greatest load, while the slower (and typically larger) storage devices have reduced load and offer a larger selection of less-popular news articles. The net result for the user is a system with a large selection of articles in which most of the requests will be served quickly from local storage devices.
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