Managed hosting services provider, NetBenefit, will implement a managed hosting solution based upon the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Cluster Suite.

Paul Holt, Regional Director, UK, Ireland and Eastern Europe at Red Hat noted, ''Hosting providers worldwide have realised the strong price and performance advantages of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and now boast some of the largest commercial deployments in production today. NetBenefit has a reputation for performance and scalability through its business critical managed hosting solutions, making it ideal to deliver and support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.''

The collaboration with Red Hat emphasizes NetBenefit's position as an experienced provider of business critical managed hosting solutions for organizations that demand continuously available websites or online applications. Through the implementation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, NetBenefit can design and deploy highly scalable Linux infrastructures that deliver failover protection for business critical applications and services, and load balancing for increased website availability.

Together with redundancy for servers, storage, network and power systems, the latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers decreased implementation costs in terms of licensing. With reduced fees, NetBenefit can offer its clients robust, enterprise-level managed hosting services without the costs usually associated with high availability and disaster recovery solutions.

Jonathan Robinson, COO, NetBenefit offered, ''NetBenefit provides managed hosting solutions for companies that need to be confident of continuous high availability or comprehensive disaster recovery. Our experienced team of Linux professionals focus on understanding what a business needs to achieve to ensure that we implement the best possible technical solution. Our continued work with Red Hat further strengthens our high availability, business critical offering and endorses NetBenefit's position in the marketplace.''

Group NBT plc is a provider of domain name management and internet-related services through the three trading brands, NetNames, NetBenefit and Easily.co.uk. Group NBT has over 200 employees and is based in London with offices in Copenhagen, New York, Nice, Frankfurt, Munich and Madrid.

Red Hat, the world's leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 50 satellite offices spanning the globe. CIOs have ranked Red Hat first for value in Enterprise Software for four consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value study. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide.

NetBenefit has designed and delivered hosting solutions in the UK for over 10 years, tailored to suit clients' requirements. Clients range from retailers, to new media design agencies, publishers and online communities. NetBenefit has multiple datacentres in the UK filled with the latest specification DELL servers. The firm offers hosting services in the UK and a number of other European countries, complementing the corporate domain name management available from sister company, NetNames. NetBenefit is a part of London listed Group NBT plc (LSE: NBT), along with brands NetNames, Easily, ASCIO and Speednames.

To learn more, please visit: www.netbenefit.com.