NaviSite Announces Plans for New Level of Service and Flexibility in Managed Hosting Offerings

Business Wire, May 31, 2001

Business/Technology Editors

ANDOVER, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 31, 2001

New `on-demand' services allow automatic provisioning of servers

to handle fluctuations in web traffic and increase site availability

NaviSite, Inc. (Nasdaq: NAVI), a leading managed application hosting provider, today announced specific product development initiatives aimed at increasing flexibility and improving customers' return on investment (ROI) from managed services. These new services enable customers to be much more proactive when dealing with changes in server demand.

NaviSite's Instant Capacity and Instant Availability services will provide customers with the ability to provision servers on-demand, allowing them to immediately respond to surges in Internet traffic without the need for extensive prior capacity planning. These offerings will allow companies to reduce capital expenditures by removing the need to build infrastructure for peak demand, and can minimize or eliminate disruptions to web operations when server problems occur.

"Enterprise customers faced with planning for unanticipated fluctuations in traffic are looking for more flexible managed service offerings that provide the ability to increase capacity on demand," said Ted Chamberlin, senior analyst at Gartner. "NaviSite's Instant Capacity and Instant Availability services are intended to specifically address this challenge by allowing customers to handle variations in traffic through near-instant provisioning of web servers. This can virtually eliminate concerns regarding capacity and site availability."

"We're committed to developing innovative ways to better service our customers. These services will provide customers with a cost effective alternative to up-front costs for anticipating peak demand," said NaviSite's CEO Joel Rosen. "In addition to the obvious customer benefits, the automatic provisioning of servers will also mean faster recovery times for NaviSite, and therefore will be an important step toward enhancing our already industry-leading operational metrics, including up-time and mean time to repair."

Instant Capacity Service

Enterprise customers with e-commerce sites want to ensure they maintain enough capacity to accommodate fluctuations in customer traffic, particularly around peak selling times, holidays and marketing promotions, and must be positioned to accommodate unexpected bursts in traffic. NaviSite's Instant Capacity service is intended to save customers both time and money by allowing them to set specific thresholds, such as for site traffic or web server CPU utilization, that determine when to trigger the automatic provisioning of additional capacity.

Instant Availability Service

A significant concern regarding a company's web operations is how much redundancy to allocate to ensure site availability if server outages occur. NaviSite's Instant Availability service is designed to automatically detect certain hardware and software failures in web servers, and quickly bring new servers online to replace the component causing the outage.

A formal beta program for Instant Capacity and Instant Availability is planned for Summer 2001.

About NaviSite, Inc.

NaviSite, Inc. is a leading provider of outsourced Web hosting and managed application services for companies conducting mission-critical business on the Internet, including enterprises and other businesses deploying Internet applications. The Company's goal is to help customers focus on their core competencies by outsourcing the management and hosting of their Web operations and applications, allowing customers to fundamentally improve the ROI of their web operations. NaviSite is a majority-owned operating company of CMGI, Inc. with minority investment from Microsoft Corporation.

NaviSite's SiteHarbor(R) solutions provide secure, reliable, co-location and high-performance hosting services, including high-performance Internet access, and high-availability server management solutions through load balancing, clustering, mirroring and storage services. In addition, NaviSite's enhanced management services, beyond basic co-location and hosting, are designed to meet the expanding needs of businesses as their Web sites and Internet applications become more complex and as their needs for outsourcing all aspects of their online businesses intensify. The Company's application services, which include application hosting, management and rental, provide cost-effective access to, as well as rapid deployment and reliable operation of, business-critical applications, including managed services for streaming media. For more information about NaviSite, please visit www.navisite.com or by phone on the East Coast call 888-298-8222, on the West Coast call 888-755-5525. NaviSite is headquartered at 400 Minuteman Road, Andover, MA 01810.

This release contains forward-looking statements, which address a variety of subjects including, for example, the expected benefits, functionality and offerings of the new NaviSite products and services discussed and the expected interoperability of the combination of the these new products and services with the existing technologies, products, services and resources of NaviSite with third party products and/or resources utilized by NaviSite in providing new or existing services. The following important factors and uncertainties, among others, could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in these forward- looking statements: NaviSite's new and existing services, products, technologies and resources may not operate as planned and/or successfully interoperate with those of third parties; NaviSite may experience difficulties integrating new and existing technologies, operations and personnel of acquisitions; increased competition and technological changes in the markets in which NaviSite competes and for the new services discussed; changes in the use and/or operation of the Internet by vendors or enterprises for business or other purposes and possible failure of any of the new services, existing systems or internal infrastructure. For a detailed discussion of these and other cautionary statements, please refer to the filings made by each of NaviSite and CMGI with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the most recent Annual Reports on Form 10-K and Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q of NaviSite