Typepad Down for 5h 45min is Unacceptable; That it took 5h 40min for first acknowledgement of a problem is Unprofessional - use Wordpress instead if you start a blog

I have to write about the Typepad total failure. Typepad runs THIS blog. I have used this blog for over 11 years and I have a paid premium account on Typepad. This blog has had over 6 million lifetime visits (thank you to all who have visited us) and my readers have left over 50,000 comments (thank you to all who contribute thoughts to the blog). While I have a formal website - www.tomiahonen.com and plenty of social media sites from Twitter to Linked In (I even have a rarely-used Facebook account) this blog is my digital home. And its always been on Typepad. Typepad is not by any means a perfect tech company, but all tech companies have their stumbles from time to time. What makes Typepad particularly relevant to this blog - the Communities Dominate blog - is that Typepad serves social media experts and providers. They are a business serving BLOGGERS. They power social media. So they are at the heart of the social media world, and they have to know its rules, and behave by it.

That is why what happened is so serious, and why it disqualifies Typepad totally as a valid alternative to consider if you want to start a blog. Five hours and 45 minutes down - in a real-time BLOG world - not of free blogs, but serving also many PAYING blog users - is completely unacceptable. This blog of mine is not a news blog or in any way a 'newsy' blog of info of very 'breaking news' type, where minutes count. Yes we occasionally break news, but most of the tech topics are not measured by a minute, they are measured more on a timing of about a day. A few hours would not kill this blog (although a 5 hour 45 minute outage is a big inconvenience to our readers many hundreds of readers were inconvenienced, we average several thousand readers every day and up to tens of thounsands on a busy day). But if you are a newsy blogger, then several hours of an outage is total credibility to you. What of SALES. Many use Typepad as a sales website (I sell my ebooks via my www.tomiahonen.com site instead) and then you are actually financially DAMAGED if the site is down for any meaningful amounts of time. This is unacceptable. Yes, tech problems happen - but even in the 1990s, when I was working for OCSNY, the internet services and networking company, we had service contracts that had 4 hour response time - covering for premium customers if they needed, 24 hour and 7 day service - we could get a TECHNICIAN to your door in less than 4 hours. A 5 hour 45 minute outage is totally unacceptable in a modern era, and for a real-time web services company, even more for a paid professional company serving bloggers. Totally unacceptable. Based on this, I cannot recommend Typepad ever again for people to use, if they are looking for a blog services or web services provider.

But it is worse. There is NO excuse for total radio silence for 5 hours and 40 minutes. That is how long it took, from when the problems started, and the first of us bloggers informed Typepad (many dozens of us complained for example on Twitter). I wrote an email, I used the problem alert website form, I posted a comment on Twitter to the @typepad account - and so did dozens and dozens of others too. I also learned that they did so on Facebook. I myself sent FOUR separate complaints in the nearly six hours via the website for example. I probably did a hundred Tweets with @typepad included in the Tweet so they all were seen at the Typepad Twitter help desk. Except nobody was there. They were - ahem - asleep. Yes. SAY Media which owns Typepad, claims it serves 400 million people worldwide, yet they cannot keep their global ONLINE business awake for 24 hours. It seems that they are on California time. How dumb is that? Serving the Pacific ocean fish? Even if you want to limit your tech support to US shores, then why not the East Coast and at least have some overlap with Europe, Africa and Latin America. But no. Typepad clearly is such cheapskates, as a global company, they only serve you when the sleepy-heads in California feel like waking up. No. This is not acceptable in a modern world. Even so, when dozens of people suddenly complain - you have ALARMS with your tech team - to WAKE THEM UP. You do not wait 5 hours and 40 minutes before you 'notice' that something is wrong. No, Typepad are a dead company. Do not sign up with them. Do not set up your blog with them. If I didn't have that many pages here, I would go right away. And if I start another blog, I will go with real professionals - like so many who are abandoing Typepad and going with Wordpress. This is unacceptable Typepad. No apology will bring back that lost time. There were people with news sites that were down for hours, sales sites that were down for hours, people who had important updates they had to do, which were now incredibly delayed. You are a disgrace. Shame on you. Any readers - do not sign up to Typepad. Go with a professional outfit like Wordpress.

Comments

[Johnnie]

http://help.typepad.com/typepad_to_wordpress.html

[Wayne Borean]

I was going to say that Wordpress imports most common blog formats, but I see that Johnnie has beaten me to it, with documentation.

[Dave Barnes]

Gotta love the cloud. Not!

[deadonthefloor]

With your hatred for Microsoft, I can't believe you're recommending a service that runs on the Azure platform.