Fairfax, Virginia, April 25, 1999-NetWhistle.com, a Virginia-based
Internet network monitoring service provider, announced today its
official launch of http://www.netwhistle.com, a web-based network
monitoring service that alerts owners of e-commerce web sites about
the uptime/downtime status of their network. While larger Internet
retailers, such as amazon.com, ebay.com and cdnow.com, posses
in-house hosting and monitoring capabilities, smaller companies who
critically rely on their e-commerce sales have traditionally
outsourced the hosting to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) such as
UUNET, Exodus, GTE Internetworking, Sprint, Savvis, Level 3, Qwest,
etc. Since most ISPs do not notify the site owner when its network is
down, smaller companies often don’t know whether or not their site is
available to the Internet.

NetWhistle.com will monitor web site performance and notify
webmasters via email or pager FREE of charge when their web site is
down, allowing them to identify technical problems before their
customers do. NetWhistle.com will generate revenue through strategic
partnering with large corporate advertisers and through offering
fee-based premium level network monitoring services on the web. These
strategic partnerships will allow NetWhistle.com to provide a
valuable service that is free to the user.

“This free service will help small business owners who entrust their
livelihood to the Internet to monitor the level of customer service
they’re providing in a proactive way”, says NetWhistle’s President,
John Hawley. “We see ourselves as the champion of small business
owners on the Internet and hope that everyone will take advantage of
this free service.”

Free web-based services are growing increasingly popular, led by
companies such as Geocities (Nasdaq:GCTY – news), theGlobe.com
(Nasdaq:TGLO – news), Infoseek (Nasdaq:SEEK – news), Lycos
(Nasdaq:LCOS – news), Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT – news), Netscape
(Nasdaq:NSCP – news), Xoom.com (Nasdaq:XMCM- news), and Yahoo
(Nasdaq:YHOO – news).

About NETWHISTLE.COM

The NetWhistle.com service is owned and operated by Statusphere, LLC,
a startup that was formed in July 1997 by a group of Internet
industry experts. The company has made the proper investment in
design and redundancy to ensure that the NetWhistle.com service is
fully-reliable. Most importantly, the monitoring servers are housed
at a world-class, multi-homed, fully-redundant hosting facility.