Will the Last Person Using Typepad Please Turn Out the Lights?

Yikes!  I've had my share of problems with the Typepad platform but today's situation was ridiculous!  As near as I can tell, their server must have blown up overnight and was down most of the day.  Their status page said they reposted backup content from a couple of days ago which meant everyone's Typepad blog was a bit stale.  Once the editing tools became available again tonight all bloggers were asked to manually republish their content.  Nice.

OK, maybe I picked the wrong day to forward a link to a recent post to several friends and business colleagues.  Or maybe I'm just paying for a blogging service that's less reliable than the other (free!) blogging service (blogger.com) that houses my other sports-related blog.  Did I mention blogger.com is  free and almost always seems to be up and running fine?  And it's free...

I know it's a hassle to switch URL's and all, but I think I've hit the limit on Typepad outages.  My one-year subscription is up in a couple of months and I think they've forced my hand.  I'll wait it out but please remind me to switch as we get closer to February.  Then again, I'm sure Typepad's periodic crashes will be a nice reminder for me...

Comments

[Alfred Thompson]

I love using MSN Spaces. And it's free. Full disclosure - I do work for Microsoft but I have been bloging at 3 other places as well and I like Spaces best.

[shel israel]

Joe,

I feel your pain, and as you know shared some of it, but I for one am willing to cut Six Apart some slack. Overall they have been a very good, customer-responsive company. They were also very helpful to me in writing Naked Conversations, which should also put you on their side. If you do decide to leave them, I think blogger.com is a step backward not forward. If I were to start from scratch today, I would very seriously consider WordPress because it is open source. But the genius behind blogger.com has long since vacated the acquirer's premises.

[Jim Minatel]

Despite the typepad problems of late, I'm still hard pressed to pull the plug and move elsewhere. Is there another commercial hosted service with the range of features typepad has, a similar number of customers, and better service uptime? I'm just not seeing the benfits of moving, yet.
And, I don't have the spare time to run my own server for this, not that the uptime would be any better that way.

[Joe Wikert]

I'm not looking for an alternative where I'd have to pay...there seem to be far too many free options available. I don't need anything sophisticated. Blogger is definitely bare bones but it does what I need. I'll definitely look at WordPress and any other viable candidates before I make a switch.

[David Yack]

I would reserve a url that you wan't your blog to be at long term. For example I use blog.davidyack.com - If I decide to host with blogger.com or where ever I just need to switch the pointer

It's all about address portabilty!

[Joel Fugazzotto]

Joe,

It looks like more folks are having similar problems with Typepad:
http://www.contentmatters.info/content_matters/2006/02/technical_woes_.html