SAN FRANCISCO -- Get ready for the Internet Darling of the Week: Exodus Communications (EXDS:Nasdaq).

Exodus, which is in the burgeoning business of managing other companies' Internet operations, may itself trigger something of an exodus of cash from investors' hands when it hits the markets as early as today. Late Wednesday night, lead underwriter Goldman Sachs priced the offering at $15 a share, well above the $9 to $11 range estimated in the prospectus.

The stock is almost a sure bet to be a hit in its first few days because the appetite for Internet stocks, which has risen to a crescendo in recent weeks, has seen few new offerings. And while there are other promising issues down the line -- ISS Group expected next week and Verio in late April -- the market is awaiting Exodus with the kind of pent-up anticipation of sailors heading for shore leave.

"I wouldn't expect the price to double, but it should do pretty well at the start," said Eileen Ohnell, an analyst at Renaissance Capital Management. "There's been a lot of buzz around it, and the IPO calendar has been pretty weak."

IPOs raised, on average, $25 million last week, according to Commscan, down from $46 million in February and $89 million last fall.

Nor is the Street's attraction to Exodus likely to be a short-lived fling. In a crowded market for Internet services, Exodus has carved out a comfortable niche at the high end of the spectrum. Rather than competing to host small sites, its client list offers some of the biggest names in the Internet and computer industry: Hewlett-Packard (HWP Quote), Computer Associates (CA Quote), GeoCities, Hotmail, Inktomi, National Semiconductor (NSM Quote), as well as publications such as PC World and USA Today. "Their client list reads like a Who's Who of the Internet world," Ohnell said.

"The high end is much more difficult if you think about it," said Marc Usem, an Internet analyst at Salomon Smith Barney. But in a weird way, that plays right into Exodus' role as Internet outsourcer. Keeping tabs on one's servers 24 hours a day, seven days a week, is a lot of work. Companies outsource to Exodus for the same reason your average netizen pays Internet service providers to host their home pages: It's less hassle and in the end less money.

Exodus is really a more highly evolved ISP, offering more capacity, more customization and more protection against the perils of business on the Internet. Its clients operate e-commerce sites or corporate intranets that are "mission-critical" -- industry jargon for "if it fails, we're really screwed." Exodus hosts servers at five Internet Data Centers in key U.S. markets (and will open two more this year, including one in London) -- each complete with back-up generators, fire suppression and high security. It monitors clients' sites, notifies them of anything unusual and redirects surfers to a mirror site should the main site shut down.

"This is really a new form of bank," said Usem. "What's being stored is the equivalent of gold: It's information gold."

How much gold? The Yankee Group forecasts that the Web industry will reach $134 billion by 2000. Exodus aims to market its services to companies rushing for that Internet El Dorado by telling them they can get there faster if they let Exodus handle the hard technical stuff. In 1997, it brought in $12.4 million in sales, compared with $3.1 million in 1996 and $1.3 million in 1995. But the costs of building network backbones and of marketing have kept its net loss growing at a similar clip. Exodus posted a $25.3 million net loss in 1997.

So attractive is Exodus' market that it's not without competition: Not only are some ISPs likely to head into the high-end market, but the company is already facing off with deep pockets such as WorldCom (WCOM Quote), GTE (GTE Quote), the Baby Bells and Frontier's (FRO Quote) GlobalCenter. But with all the problems and risks besetting the Internet in its early days, there's plenty of room for competitors. And Exodus' reputation as a leader in this area was only enhanced with the appointment last week of Ellen Hancock, a popular veteran of Apple (AAPL Quote), National Semiconductor and IBM (IBM Quote).

Exodus' prospectus, of course, has the usual list of risks that have become the excelsior to pad out the S-1's of Internet startups. And for a company that's in the business of making sure the Web sites of major companies work smoothly, there sure are a lot of potential problems that could hurt its business: hackers, system failures, earthquakes, floods, changes in standards, scalability barriers, bureaucratic meddling, among others. Indeed, the prospectus legalese reads like the plot outline from a dozen Hollywood disaster movies (or the front page of last week's New York Times).