With only two web servers on hand - hired from Verio in the US - Tehelka.com had to deploy five more servers from Verio and other US server farms, within 24 hours of the scam breaking, in order to cope with the rush of visitors to the site.

According to the Tehelka.com webmaster, Mr Fahad Moti Khan: "We did anticipate the rush, but not to the extent it actually happened. The website was virtually jammed and we were getting frantic calls from people asking why the website was down!" Adds Mr Khan: "The situation is now stable and under control, but if we face any more problems, we are ready to deploy two more servers immediately."

In a vindication of its efforts, Tehelka.com has also been rewarded with more hits than it can keep track of. When asked about the total number of hits, Mr Khan admitted with a sense of pride: "The log files are locked to capacity, making it difficult and complex to analyse the access data, that is the number of hits. But you can imagine the impact because after breaking the news on Tuesday, the website got 20 million hits and seven million page views in the first eight hours itself. After that, it was impossible to keep track."

Cashing in on the ongoing rush to access the site, Tehelka is now commanding a 75 per cent premium on its standard advertising rates for banners on its webpages. When contacted, a consultant working with an online advertising server company, Mediaturf, Ms Manjula R Natrajan, confirmed that Tehelka is asking for a 75-100 per cent premium on its advertisement rates. The website, which is believed to have been offering ad placements at a price of around Rs 250-300 for 1,000 impressions earlier, is now demanding around Rs 500 for 1,000 impressions.

Though Ms Natrajan agreed that there are a number of enquiries from clients about placing advertisements on Tehelka.com, she added that there have not been many new deals. Here's why: "New advertisers to Tehelka.com will have to spend a lot of money to buy bulk impressions to be visible on such a crowded website," says Ms Natrajan. "If you buy a few thousand impressions, they will get exhausted very early leaving no impact."

The banner space for advertisements on websites are sold through ad-server agencies, which mediate between the website and advertisers. The agencies upload the advertisements on their own servers and provide connections to the several websites for display as per the deals. Some of the major current advertisers on Tehelka.com include ICICI, Apnaloan.com and Makemytrip.com.