We installed WordPress directly on our site at http://www.skipease.com/blog and couldn’t be happier. We got out just in time to save our blog information, but now we are 3 months behind in building our traffic thanks to Typepad.

New and experienced bloggers would do well to take the time to register a domain name of their own and install WordPress or other blogging software directly on server space provided by a reliable service provider. We should have done that right from the beginning.

However, today I’m writing from the car on my new Samsung PDA phone – moblogginq with a PDA phone is not as much fun as I thought it would be. I think I’ll get a new laptop instead. Besides Typepad is not particularly compatible with smaller screens.

If you’re paying for your own hosting you won’t find a host that will guarantee anymore than 99% uptime and that sounds wonderful but you do the maths you find that over a year 1% downtime equates to 87 hours a year that they don’t guarantee.

Nobody can guarantee being online 24/7/365 and it sucks when your site goes down but you just have to live with it. Even Google hasn’t been able to achieve 100% up time.

So what happened here today was extremely bad luck for those that it happened to but no more than that.

And to my Anil’s response looked to be far better than what others might have offered. My partner and I have lost serious money when our servers have been down but no one has offered us compensation because it just falls into that 1% black hole that is unavoidable.

I assume you mean a normal WordPress install, not a hosted site like you find on wordpress.com. In that case, WP won’t fail unless your server itself tanks. And even then there are plugins that automate backups and such so that if that does happen, it’s not an issue.

There is also a mechanism to import MT, typepad, blogger, etc. blogs built into WP.

Thanks for responding. Doing so speaks volumes.

Thanks,

Vic

We’ll talk more about what we’re doing to remedy this in the future, but for right now, I hope it helps that everything is back up and running. And Victor, if you’re frustrated with your customization options, you can use a tool like Adobe GoLive to tweak your design on TypePad or MT, and we’ve got a huge community of developers and designers who can help with that as well.

Thanks for your response Darren.

Vic

I have been blogging off an on for a year. I found TypePad just before Thanksgiving 2004, and since then I have tried a variety of blogging initiatives, some more successful than others. I bought their large package and I’ve had a lot of fun and grown a lot personally by experimenting with it.

The other posters who have commented on TypePad’s support are correct. The support staff is responsive, friendly, understanding, supportive. They are a great crew — and when it comes to customer retention, they will be a strong reason for users to stay with TypePad.

I think about once a week about migrating from TypePad to Movable Type. I like Six Apart’s approach to both the practical as well as creative and ethical sides of business, and I’d like to stay with their product line and brand. The Yahoo!/MT announcement — whose timing may be a blessing in disguise for Six Apart — certainly has me thinking a lot of “What ifs?”

My strongest reaction concerns my client relationships. I have been trying to introduce blogging as a standard feature of work for clients. Today, I presented a new client with an up-and-going blog, filled with content, ready for them to take over and run themselves with my assistance. The client is not terribly web skilled, and the idea of blogging struck them with the same enthusiasm that I think a lot of more tech types felt a year or so ago.

Last night, I printed out the entire blog, including embedded files, and had Kinkos bind it into a half-inch-thick book. I noticed today that TypePad was down and thought to myself, “Maybe the client will look just at the hard copy and not go to the broken TypePad site.”

Wrong. When I visited with the client, he was leafing through my presentation book on the blog. But he had just checked it online and had discovered TypePad’s problem for himself. I felt myself burn because I vouched for Six Apart and on the day I wanted them to be most impressive, they were instead most confounding.

C’est la vie. I hope that the Six Apart crew enjoys the best of luck restoring TypePad service — and I hope it happens soon. Some very good people must be mighty annoyed with themselves right now.

File this under “When bad things happen to good companies.”

I hope their p.r. firm’s crisis communications plan is being put into effect. If not, I’m available…

– dtd

My blog:
http://www.straighttalkpr.com

As I wrote in my previous post – the advice I’m giving clients who are on typepad is to hang in there and ride the storm. From what I can see the problem came when they were doing a largescale update which is a good sign to me. While the problem is frustrating at present they seem to be doing their best to provide a better service.

of course my advice varies depending upon the goal of the blog. There are some blogs I’d highly recommend upgrade to hosted options with MT or WP partly for issues of uptime and data security but also for features and adaptability.

http://www.sixapart.com/typepad/news/2005/12/update_on_typep.html

I can’t say that I know alot about their inner-workings, but I would think after a few (3ish ?) years of service, they would’ve gotten most of the ‘bugs’ ironed out and redundant systems in place.

They’re going to have a lot of public relations work ahead of them. Looking on the web from October’s experiences, and today’s, the news is spreading like wildfire.

Vic

I’d prefer to stay on Moveable Type, since I’m using custom MT templates throughout my blog. That means jumping to a small third-party provider, who will probably have much less sophisticated equipment and systems than Six Apart. The end result? I could easily get blown out of the water again. Moving to WordPress would involve some serious design work, and there are no guarantees that it won’t go belly-up at some point as well.

The long and the short? I’m sticking with TypePad for my current blog. They’ve been investing heavily in new infrastructure, and this incident can only improve their backup and failsafe procedures. My next blog, however, will be running on Wordpress. That provides a bit of redundancy.

[btw, my site traffic seems remarkably normal today, especially since I'm re-hashing week old content. The wonder of search engines is that many people discover sites for the first time each day.]

I say.. he is right..but well, something needs to be done to minimize the fall away.

–An avid Internet browser