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...
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.
Posted by: Alfred Thompson | December 16, 2005 at 11:39 PM
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.
Posted by: shel israel | December 18, 2005 at 12:35 PM
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.
Posted by: Jim Minatel | December 18, 2005 at 07:05 PM
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.
Posted by: Joe Wikert | December 18, 2005 at 07:30 PM
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!
Posted by: David Yack | December 23, 2005 at 07:54 PM
Joe,
It looks like more folks are having similar problems with Typepad:
http://www.contentmatters.info/content_matters/2006/02/technical_woes_.html
Posted by: Joel Fugazzotto | February 07, 2006 at 12:54 PM