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TypePad blogs go down and lose content

Six Apart's TypePad is a heck of a service. However, because of periodic problems with down time, now losing some content and limitations it has compared to Six Apart's Moveable Type I would not recommend Web development companies doing work for law firms and other professional service companies to host their customer's blogs on TypePad.

Steve Rubel reports TypePad bloggers, he and Seth Godin included, suffered some downtime earlier this week when a glitch caused all blogs with a URL beginning with ‘S’ to go offline briefly and unfortunately to lose a handful of the files. Note that Steve, though originally upset, was very impressed by TypePad's response.

Everyone talks about blogs being easy to set in a few minutes at a low cost on a service like TypePad. Some developers even sell their design services and then install their clients blogs, law firms included, blogs on TypePad so as to save the clients a few bucks. But when the blog goes down who is the developer going to call – TypePad? C'mon. Large law firms are going to expect more. In addition, There are a number of blog enhancements that can not be delivered with TypePad.

So sure TypePad is a great service, but not one to seriously consider for medium and large law firms or other businesses with a professional clientele. Being penny wise can be pound foolish.

  • Josh Fruchter

    Hmmm…I actually read the article cited in the post and it doesn't knock Typepad at all – actually praises them for getting the service back up quickly and compensating Steve.
    Let each person judge for him or herself:
    http://www.micropersuasion.com/2005/10/typepad_loses_s.html
    More importantly, Six Apart owns both Typepad and Movable Type – if anyone seriously thinks Typepad is having problems, I suggest they'd best get off Movable Type as well since that software won't be supported too well either (honestly, I don't think anyone believes that Six Apart is in trouble so this is all tongue-in-cheek).
    Last, I'd say the strange bug reported could happen to any software (did I hear Microsoft?) – at the end of the day, I'd rather have my blog running on servers operated by Typepad (with all of Six Apart's resources behind it) than servers running MT operated by a firm with fewer resources.

  • http://tcattorney.typepad.com Enrico Schaefer

    I have thought about moving to Movable Type on a hosted server but am concerned about losing all those incoming links and starting over. Any thoughts on this issue Kevin? Thanks.

  • http://kevin.lexblog.com Kevin O'Keefe

    Josh, no doubt Steve liked Six Apart's response to the problem – I posted a link to Steve's post.
    But your understanding of Movable Type (MT) and Typepad is misguided. Strong development houses use MT as a base and then modify it to meet their clients needs. The ability to modify MT is what makes it so attractive.
    In addition those developers often host MT to avoid the types of problems Steve Rubel faced here. Take Steve's anger times 100 in the case of a major law firm if their blogs went down and their service provider answers it's TypePad's problem, not ours, and though we cannot reach TypePad by phone we'll file a ticket with their help desk.
    Could you imagine the blogs of one of the 200 largest law firms in the country going down and losing some of their content because because their name began with S. Companies hosting such law firm blogs on TypePad to save the law firm a few bucks would be failing their clients miserably.
    You're not going to find the thousands of sophisticated designers and developers using MT agreeing with you that TypePad is a good fit for major businesses, including law firms serious about their Internet marketing efforts.
    Arguing with you about this is really rather silly. Blogger owned by a company with huge resources goes down all the time. There is no correlation between TypePad having some problems and MT being run being run by a strong development team.