Double, Double TypePad Trouble

I have used TypePad for nearly two years and have loved its power and ease of use. In fact, all of the personal and professional blogs I am involved with are TypePad sites. When people ask me to recommend a blogging tool, my first answer is always TypePad, unless they just want to experiment for free. I love Six Apart and have been consistently amazed by their customer service.

The last two months, however, have severely tested this loyalty. The service has grown increasingly slow, sometimes to the point of being unusable. I have had situations where I had to spend over five minutes just to publish one post. Using any of the administrative tools (includes stats) involves numerous delays. This slow down has been accompanied by actual downtime where the service and our sites are completely unavailable.

No one expects perfection, but TypePad is presented as a premium blog service and charges more than most competitors. With the problems being widespread, and apparently including data loss, I would expect an upfront attempt to address this, including what the problem is, what's being done to fix it, when will it be solved, and an apology for the problems. Extending current subscriptions or offering a credit would also be a positive step.

Obviously, rapid growth and great success often lead to growing pains, but that doesn't change the fact that I'm paying for a service that's not reliable. For the first time, I'm investigating alternatives. Hopefully, we'll see some improvements soon.

Comments

[Chris Marsden]

I used TypePad on my own server both for blogging and for a dynamic "news" website for our youth group. I used the free version to get going but had a hard time getting questions answered. I switched to Word Press and haven't had anywhere near the hassle. It is a bit more complicated to do additional pages off the home, but it just took getting used to. It is even included as a self install, self setup, in fantastico (which my servers run). I occassionally miss a feature or two that TypePad offered, but cost and hassles, vs free and easy keep me on Word Press.

[Barry Bowen]

Six Apart has a status blog indicating when they upgrade their services. It shows they had some problems Oct 25th.

http://status.sixapart.com/

[Mabel]

There are things I love. Things I hate. Current hate? They refuse to show you the entire template so I'm unable to change it.

[phil crissman]

WordPress. ;-) I've only used it for a week, now; awesome.

...though it would be a lot simpler if Typepad could stay up (scores of old links would stay active, for example) and be reliable. I'm sorry to hear there've been problems.

[Anthony D. Coppedge]

I'm a big fan of B2Evolution. It's what I use and I'm thrilled with the power, admin controls and easy-to-use interface. It's not free, but it is very reasonably priced.

My 3 cents (increased due to gas prices),

Anthony

[*ginevra]

hey there = we really appreciate your patience, and I thinkw e've got things ironed out now. keep an eye out on Mena's Corner and the status weblog mentioned above for some more details.

In the meantime, we feel your pain. :/

[Brian Bailey]

Thanks for the terrific feedback. Wordpress definitely has a good buzz going. I wish it supported databases other than MySQL (if I were going to host it) and I wish it supported multiple blogs in one install. Phil, I look forward to hearing more about your experiences.

Anthony, your feedback is worth a lot more than $0.03!

And thanks to Six Apart for offering their perspective.

One last thing - due to a major mistake on my part, the original post was deleted. I was thankfully able to repost it along with the great comments. My apologies for any oddities that resulted.

[Jay Allen]

Just to let you all know, Ben and Mena just posted about the problems we've been experiencing and what we've been doing about it: http://www.sixapart.com/about/corner/2005/10/the_ups_downs_o.html

We're really sorry that this is happening and I can promise you that we absolutely are doing everything we can to get TypePad back to it's normal excellent service levels. In the meantime, we really appreciate your patience and sticking by us. We'll certainly make it worth it.

As far as switching, if you ever get to the point where you feel its necessary to switch, Movable Type ( http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype ) is going to be a much better choice for you as a TypePad user because it's mostly what you're already used to (including the same designs) but packaged up for you to run on your own server.

But of course, we'd prefer just to make you a really happy TypePad user and we intend to do that very soon.