Alternate to IRCTC. Review on IRCTC

I had to travel to Bangalore for Diwali and thought of booking my tickets in Tattkal; loged in by 6:00 in the morning and kept refreshing the page and proceeded to the booking by sharp 8:00 AM (Tattkal starts by 8:00 AM) and the page Service Unavailable.

Kept trying and some time it will not take the station codes and say 503 Service Unavailable or kept throwing some errors; and last got the page and gave my credit card details for processing and it kept saying processing for a few minutes and then the same Service Unavailable again. I have tried from IE and Google Chrome and the same issue in both the browser.

Called some friends to check if they were able to book and it was the same issue. by then the train that I planned to travel was full and moved on to waiting list and I started to try on a different train. (It was 11:30 AM by then)

Checkout for alternative and most of the online booking had the same issue; at last tried in clear trip and to my shock got my ticket in the 1st go and it did not take more than 2 minutes for me to book from clear trip.

I had used IRCTC plenty of time and would have booked more than 30 to 40 tickets without any problem, the problem arises only during the Tattkal booking timing on festival seasons.

My suggestion is please forget about the irctc website during peak hours as it s**ks and start using an alternative, and I prefer cleartrip as it went through without any hazels got an SMS of their transaction ID almost immediately and a mailer with an attachment of my e-ticket.

All the best.... if you are using the irctc online booking service in the peak hours.