Web Sites Are Winners and Losers During Super Bowl XXXIII

Huntsville, Alabama - (January 31, 1999) - There were winners and losers at Super Bowl XXXIII, and not just on the field. A number of high profile web sites linked to the game gave a mixed performance, with some sites showing superb performance while others struggled to handle the traffic.

"The Super Bowl is the toughest challenge any Web site can face," says Tom Dahm, Chief Technology Officer for NetMechanic.com, "The traffic is just incredible." Dahm was monitoring the main Super Bowl web sites using NetMechanic's Server Check Pro monitoring service. The service monitors Web servers to see if they are responding and tracks how quickly they respond.

"The main Super Bowl site, superbowl.lycos.com, gave a stellar performance," Dahm says, "If you didn't know they were receiving a surge of traffic during the game, you'd never have guessed it." This year's official Super Bowl Web site, superbowl.lycos.com was run by Lycos and the NFL. The site was also reachable through the URL www.superbowl.com.

"Performance of the site was remarkable," says Dahm. He says the server's performance during the game was better than the NetMechanic server average. NetMechanic collects data from a range of Web servers and compares this to each monitored server's performance.

The excellent performance of the Lycos site stands in contrast to that of some previous event Web sites. Last year's Super Bowl site was inaccessible for much of the game due to a failed router, and earlier this month the Fiesta Bowl Web site was swamped by traffic shortly after kickoff.

"The job of these big events sites has gotten tougher," says Dahm, "Not only are more people getting online today, but the nature of the Web is changing. Today it isn't enough to just to have a site, you've got to have multimedia and interactive games. All that puts an extra load on the server."

Also receiving high marks during Sunday night's game was Broadcast.com, who provided streaming audio and video during the game in partnership with the Lycos site. Throughout the game, the site's servers responded well.

However, not all of Lycos' Super Bowl partners faired as well. "The big loser of the evening was the QB1 site, "says Dahm. QB1.com is NTN Enterprises' interactive game site. The site was intended to let viewers play along with the game, calling play as an armchair quarterback.

The QB1 site was inaccessible for much of the game. Beginning in the second quarter, the server stopped responding to outside requests. "Each time we polled them during the quarter, and they failed every request," says Dahm, "They came back online at half time, but then started having problems again in the third quarter."

In these cases NetMechanic sends an alarm to the webmaster, either via email or pager. "I'd say they knew they were down, though," Dahm says. "When you've got a big event like the Super Bowl going on, you're going to be watching your server closely. "

NetMechanic's service is designed to notify webmasters who don't know their server is down. The service monitors its client's Web servers every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day, from multiple monitoring stations.

"Web servers are pretty reliable computers, but they're not foolproof," Dahm says, "The typical server will stay up for anywhere from one to six weeks without rebooting. But sooner or later they all go down. Our service is designed to let you know when you're down, before your customers call to complain."

More about NetMechanic

NetMechanic (www.netmechanic.com) is a web site maintenance service providing low cost site testing and monitoring. NetMechanic has tested over 5,000,000 Web pages, and currently tests over 600,000 pages a month.

NetMechanic's online services are targeted toward webmasters who outsource their site hosting to an Internet Service Provider or Internet Presence Provider. Since these users do not have control of the computer hosting their site, existing desktop or server-based maintenance applications cannot adequately address their needs. NetMechanic works by monitoring and testing sites from remote web servers operated by their own service, allowing easy setup with no software downloads.

NetMechanic is a member of the recently formed Web Host Guild (www.whg.org), an organization developed to set standards for the web host industry and protect consumers from shoddy business practices. Founding members of the Web Host Guild include: Concentric Network, Hiway Technologies, NetMechanic, Sage Network, Sumo, Inc., Web2010, and Worldwide Internet.

NetMechanic was developed by Monte Sano Software, LLC, an Internet software development firm based in Huntsville, Alabama. For more information contact Cindy O'Gorman at (256) 533-0076 ext. 116, pr@netmechanic.com, or visit the company's Web site at http://www.netmechanic.com.

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