Okay, I’ve had it. TypePad has been sluggish/down all morning (Pacific time) for me and I think their grace period is over. I know that they’ve been having infrastructure problems. I know they have plans in place. But it doesn’t look like things are falling into place for them. Look, I think the TypePad model is great. I think MT is a super platform and this has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the Qumana blog and several of my other blogs are run on Blogware. But, man, TypePad is just blowing it today. This is further strengthening my case for true “business class” blog hosting.
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I have something like 4 articles I wanted to publish to Business Blog Consulting but I can’t even get into the TypePad web interface to enter the posts in manually (lets not even talk about Qumana posting remotely). Our discussions over at BBC are getting pretty serious about jumping ship. Sorry Anil and Mena … hey we might even use MT for the new site, but I’ve had it. We can’t run businesses like this. I know that at least one colleague was due to train a client on TP today. Hmm, that’s not going to happen. Worse, many less tech savvy clients don’t really distinguish between a hosted system not in the consultant’s control and something the consultant has a hand in. Not to mention the fact that the consultant recommended the system in the first place.
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Look, I get just as frustrated at Blogware too. Blogware, though, I know, is making real efforts to make things better. How about you Six Apart? Speaking of which, both Blogware and SquareSpace folks left comments on my post … guys?
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Update: As you can see I am finally able to post this here on BBC. I don’t speak for all the authors at BBC, only myself.
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Hi Tris… I’ll jump in here (I run corp dev and sales at Six Apart). Needless to say, none of us are particularly happy with TypePad’s performance of late either, we are in “all hands on deck” mode as we work to solve these problems. Everyone in engineering is focused on solving these issues and we are not working on any new projects until we have stabilized the situation on TypePad.
It’s been an unfortunate case of whack-a-mole of late: as soon as we solve one problem, another pops up. As you probably know, we had a good run from last Tuesday through the weekend of very strong performance. Just as we were ready to declare some stability, some new problems caught us yesterday morning and today. Different problems from before, although we know that’s not necessarily comforting. Still, each of the fixes we’ve made (whether to hardware or software) has left TypePad stronger and more reliable and once we squash the remaining issues, I think TypePad will be back as never before.
We hope you stick with us as we will not rest until this is fixed and we bring TypePad back to the level of performance that everyone is used to and expects from us. We are still very much a start-up and our business depends on the strength of TypePad. We take the business blogging community’s needs very seriously and realize that you need a higher level of service and reliability. We will return to providing that level of service as quickly as we can.
Please feel free to email me directly (aa at sixapart.com) if you’d like to discuss this in more detail.
Comment by aa — November 8, 2005 @ 6:05 pm
I appreciate you taking the time to respond to both posts. I also appreciate you candor and honesty. Let’s hope my frustration wanes. Still, you have an uphill battle right now with the business blogging community.
Comment by Tris Hussey — November 9, 2005 @ 11:20 am
Expectation and Customer Experience
This post has two purposes. The first is to discuss expectation and our overall customer experience as determined by customer service or tech support. Probably that is the experience you are expecting based upon the title. The second, is to
Trackback by Resonance Partnership Blog — November 10, 2005 @ 3:30 am