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Typepad outage hits 13 hours

December 16, 2005

Blogs on the TypePad web based platform have been down for over 13 hours. TypePad, the leader in consumer and social blogs, is owned by and run by SixApart, a company with an excellent customer service track record. So I expect them to respond quickly here.

For now, here’s a report from Susannah Gardner at Buzz Marketing with Blogs.

The popular hosted blogging service Typepad has been largely unavailable for 13 hours now. There’s a fair amount of foaming at the mouth (see Google News, Technorati and Ice Rocket) occuring within the blogosphere—bloggers don’t like to be without their personal diary or business communication tool for extended periods. Many say that this failure is one in a string of service issues with the service.

The latest Everything Typepad blog post about the situation indicates that a primary disk system failed during maintenance last night, and that they are restoring backup copies from two days ago. Even for blogs that are back up, comments are as yet unavailable. This means lost blog time, lost blog posts, and lost interaction with readers. I have a fair amount of sympathy for Typepad; working in the technical world means suffering through these kinds of unpredictable and unrecoverable hardware failures, but then again, I’m not running a Typepad blog I depend on being available on a daily basis.

In ‘Buzz Marketing with Blogs for Dummies,’ I spend quite a bit of time walking through the pros and cons of using a hosted blogging service—one that runs on a blogging company’s Web servers—as opposed to installing a blog software package on your own server. Chalk this one into the con side for hosted blogs.

I agree with Susannah. Law firms, corporations and other professional services businesses cannot run their blogs on mass web based platforms such as TypePad, Google, MSN Spaces and others without risking problems like this. These businesses need to have a professional developer design, build, host and run their blogs. Such businesses must have an accountable person they can reach by phone and have that party respond in a New York minute. That’s one of the reasons LexBlog has had success.

And I am not knocking Six Apart. LexBlog uses and hosts their professional blog software, Movable Type, which we have modified to meet our client’s needs. Works great.

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