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January 11, 2007

WebSitePulse Announces Holiday Retail Performance Results


Dear Valued Customer,

We are pleased to inform you that we just finalized our 2006 Online Retail Performance and Uptime Report. For the second consecutive year, we measured the website response time and website availability of the top 10 most popular online shopping destinations in the period between Thanksgiving and the end of the year.

Even though most of the leading online retailers offered uninterrupted and consistently reliable web services during this record-breaking Holiday Season, some of them experienced serious website performance and uptime problems:

- On Black Friday, the response time for a typical web transaction of Walmart.com reached critical levels 6-7 times higher than its regular values. This resulted in interruption of the daily e-business activities of Walmart for about 10 hours;
- On December 13, Walmart.com web servers were under heavy pressure from online buyers related to the increased demand for the Elmo doll. WebSitePulse first detected the error at 12:00 pm. The Walmart website was fully functional again at 12:52 pm;
- BestBuy.com was unavailable for online Customers on December 14, 15, and 16 for an estimated total of ten hours;
- Sears.com struggled with website availability problems on December 22 for approximately four hours;
- Sears.com and BestBuy.com finished last in the 2005 Holiday Season Report, as well, with 99.27% and 98.99% of website uptime respectively. A typical Daily Average Uptime for the entire Group is 99.9%.

The Reports reflect not only the performance of the home pages, but typically measure a complete web transaction representing the most typical End Users' interactions with a website. The WebSitePulse application monitoring service was used to collect data and to create the reports. For additional convenience, an RSS feed from the daily Reports is available to everyone interested in the performance and availability of the monitored websites.

As a global web monitoring service provider, we are inviting our International Customers to submit their ideas and suggestions for important events or Holidays in their own countries and regions that might impact the Internet traffic volume and the web performance of popular local online destinations. We will be happy to create Custom Performance Tracking Reports related to these events, and to use our expertise to correlate the results with the overall online shopping experience in these countries.

Thank you for your business, and Happy New Year,

Iavor Marinoff - CEO
WebSitePulse™
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