Typepad went down for about 18 hours on Friday. Many bloggers are now bailing on the service – Neville Hobson has been planning his for some time and is moving to WordPress (see his new blog here), the ever insightful Jeff Nolan, of SAP’s Project Apollo, has had enough and is moving to WordPress too, and Dennis Howlett is ‘outta here’ – presumably to his Moveable Type platform.
I like Typepad for its simplicity but the scaling issues are a concern. I’m already backing up my blog regularly but think it might be time to upgrade to a WordPress or MT hosted service. Yahoo now has a hosted Moveable Type service. I presume the upgrade path from Typepad to MT is going to be smoother than to WordPress, but from what I’ve read it’s a painful process either way.
Personally I haven’t lost any posts or images yet, but the warning signs are all there. From a communications perspective, it’s a tough one for SixApart since its users are sensitive to service disruption and also have the ability to be highly vocal if they’re not satisfied. SixApart has built up a lot of goodwill, but is now running down its credits. Andy Lark sums it up nicely:
‘The bar is low, stop letting it hit you in the head. We are with you and love what you enable us to do. But you’ve got to start leaping over that bar. Otherwise we will become users, not evangelists.’
If it continues it might even be worse. We will become ex-users and detractors.