05-10-2006, 12:52 AM
<b>Sachin's pilgrimage whips up frenzy</b>
Jaideep Shenoy
www.kukkesubramanya.com
records 9 lakh hits in six hours
DOING A PENANCE: Sachin Tendulkar does "go puja" at end of the two-day "sarpa santharpane" at Kukke Subrahmanya temple in Dakshina Kannada on Monday.
MANGALORE: When Sachin Tendulkar is on the move, the whole cricket world follows him, even if it is a purely personal visit to a temple. Sachin came to Kukke Sri Subrahmanya Temple nestled at the foothills of Western Ghats in Sullia taluk of Dakshina Kannada district apparently seeking solace for a "sarpa dosha".
What was to be a purely personal affair, made it to headlines with the dailies and the television channels splashing the images of Sachin and his wife Anjali performing the puja. The fallout of this is that netizens throughout the world started searching for details of the temple on internet.
Google directed the visitors to www.kukkesubramanya.com, a website developed and managed by Raghavendra Shastri, corporate president of Getit Yellow Pages.
On a normal day, the website gets 1,000 "hits." But when news trickled that the Tendulkars were at the shrine, the website recorded 47,000 hits between 6 p.m. and midnight on Sunday.
By 10 a.m. on Monday, the website recorded 9 lakh visitors. The server of the website started sending alerts to Mr. Shastri that the load on it was growing and reaching unmanageable proportions. The website crashed at 1.30 p.m.
Mr. Shastri told The Hindu that he had upgraded the server capacity to accommodate 5 lakh visitors at a time to the site. "While I did reply to a few e-mails in the beginning, I had to resort to auto-answer option asking the netizens to get in touch with the temple authorities. I have obtained rights from heads of various local temples to host their website giving detailed information about the place to any pilgrim in this non-commercial venture," he said.
Jaideep Shenoy
www.kukkesubramanya.com
records 9 lakh hits in six hours
DOING A PENANCE: Sachin Tendulkar does "go puja" at end of the two-day "sarpa santharpane" at Kukke Subrahmanya temple in Dakshina Kannada on Monday.
MANGALORE: When Sachin Tendulkar is on the move, the whole cricket world follows him, even if it is a purely personal visit to a temple. Sachin came to Kukke Sri Subrahmanya Temple nestled at the foothills of Western Ghats in Sullia taluk of Dakshina Kannada district apparently seeking solace for a "sarpa dosha".
What was to be a purely personal affair, made it to headlines with the dailies and the television channels splashing the images of Sachin and his wife Anjali performing the puja. The fallout of this is that netizens throughout the world started searching for details of the temple on internet.
Google directed the visitors to www.kukkesubramanya.com, a website developed and managed by Raghavendra Shastri, corporate president of Getit Yellow Pages.
On a normal day, the website gets 1,000 "hits." But when news trickled that the Tendulkars were at the shrine, the website recorded 47,000 hits between 6 p.m. and midnight on Sunday.
By 10 a.m. on Monday, the website recorded 9 lakh visitors. The server of the website started sending alerts to Mr. Shastri that the load on it was growing and reaching unmanageable proportions. The website crashed at 1.30 p.m.
Mr. Shastri told The Hindu that he had upgraded the server capacity to accommodate 5 lakh visitors at a time to the site. "While I did reply to a few e-mails in the beginning, I had to resort to auto-answer option asking the netizens to get in touch with the temple authorities. I have obtained rights from heads of various local temples to host their website giving detailed information about the place to any pilgrim in this non-commercial venture," he said.