PRESS RELEASE
22nd August, 2006

NetRegistry is disappointed with WebCentral board’s decision to reject pursuing our $1.65 to $1.75 per share, $74m to $78m proposal to acquire the WebCentral Group.

NetRegistry disagrees with aspects of the WebCentral Group’s recent ASX announcement and statements made by the WebCentral Chairman at the Scheme meeting yesterday. We disagree that our proposal is highly conditional. NetRegistry and its partner HostWorks Ltd have raised $60m of committed debt and cash. The statement that our proposal required WebCentral to raise an additional $15 million equity is simply false - NetRegistry has a number of equity partners interested to fund the balance in the unlikely event that 100% of WebCentral shareholders took up our cash buy back offer. The requirement for $15m equity would decrease if some shareholders held their shares.

Larry Bloch, CEO of NetRegistry said “NetRegistry had full confidence in securing the necessary equity sufficient for a fully funded offer of $1.75. What we lacked was support by WebCentral’s Board. Our view was that the support of the WebCentral Board was the pivotal condition remaining for our proposal.”

NetRegistry also indicated to WebCentral we would be prepared the meet the break fee of $600, 000, if WebCentral shareholders rejected the Scheme of Arrangement at Monday’s shareholders meeting and a NetRegistry proposal was supported by the Board.

We believe the value of our proposed bid is far greater than Melbourne IT’s – both in cash and potential upside. The structure of our bid will separate WebCentral‘s two main businesses into a high end hosting business and a shared and domain name business – each to be managed by specialists: managed and complex, to be run by Hostworks and Shared Hosting by NetRegistry. Ensuring market specialists focus on their specialities unlocks greater value from the WebCentral business.

“I believe our proposal is significantly better for WebCentral shareholders. At $1.75 cash WebCentral shareholders would have a better deal. However, without the WebCentral Board clearly indicating their support for a bid at that price, we simply ran out of time”, said Bloch.

NetRegistry has 10 years experience of hosting, unlike Melbourne IT who has just two years. We have our own dedicated, Australian based infrastructure compared to Melbourne IT’s outsourcing arrangement with a US based hosting provider.

NetRegistry is Australia’s second largest domain name registrar after Melbourne IT and surpassed them in new registrations in May this year. We are the second largest shared hosting company in Australia (after WebCentral) having serviced 50,000 hosted services since 1997. Our focus on world class clustered, load balanced shared hosting technology in conjunction with automated business processes has resulted in 1 in 3.5 customers upgrading from domain only to hosted services, an enviable up sell statistic.

NetRegistry is the third hosting business founded by Larry Bloch – the first of which is listed on the London Stock Exchange and the second was sold to another UK listed plc.

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