With Christmas less than six weeks away, it's an odd time for online retailer BestBuy.com Inc. to hand off responsibility for Web-sitemonitoring to a third party. Retailers are typically reluctant to make significant changes to their management infrastructure so close to the Web's busiest shopping season.

BestBuy.com, a subsidiary of consumer electronics and appliance retailer Best Buy Co. in Eden Prairie, Minn., chose ManageWare from Totality Inc. for the job. Totality provides round-the-clock site monitoring and application-and infrastructure-management services for about 25 Web sites, including retailers such as American Airlines, Bluelight.com, and The Sharper Image.

Best Buy chose to host its site with Exodus Communications Inc. in the fall of 1999, which gave it the reputation of being an early adopter of outsourcing services, says Andy Schroepfer, president of Tier 1 Research. Schroepfer is surprised it took Best Buy this long to make this latest outsourcing decision. But it's a move that will add support to the internal IT staff, he says. "It's an insurance policy."

Totality's premium services are priced at $60,000 to more than $200,000 per month. Besides monitoring a site's capacity and availability and handling backup and recovery, Totality will also update databases when a retailer wants to run a promotion or add merchandise to its catalog. Where Exodus provides network-management services such as space, power, and bandwidth, Totality ensures the efficacy of the servers, applications, and databases, says Sharmila Shahani, Totality's marketing VP.

Totality conducts an audit of a site before moving it into the company's operations center. BestBuy.com was in good shape when Totality audited the Web site in early September. That's one reason the transition was relatively quick, Shahani says. "The risk is low for Best Buy because they picked a provider that has proven its ability to move fast," Schroepfer says. Best Buy will be able to monitor the site's infrastructure, in real time, via a Web browser.