It was almost exactly a year ago that I had to sign up for TypePad to find out why I couldn’t leave comments on any TypePad blogs, which a few days later was resolved. Thankfully this problem hasn’t recurred.

But the folks behind TypePad, Six Apart (6A), have had other problems. Especially recently:

During routine maintenance of our network and storage systems last night, we experienced an issue with our primary disk system where data from published blogs are stored. We are currently running diagnostics on the device, and working to restore your data as soon as possible. Verifying data can be a slow process and will take time.

This outage was amplified by Netcraft issuing a status note and being slashdotted. Uh oh. The converse are customers like Robert Scoble who thinks 6A currently is getting a “raw deal.”.

Raw deal?

A ‘raw deal’ are the bloggers losing more in ad revenue than they pay in hosting costs because of downtime, not 6A being unable to service the load. Maybe Scoble should be applauding the business decisions of those who choose to leave in favor of more reliable hosting?

Wonder how Mena feels about civility on the web now? Welcome to the business world on the web, 6A! People are paying them for reliability, not excuses. Yeah, customer loyalty does mean something, I’ve been with one of our hosting companies since 1999, but what are we paying hosting companies for?

Reliability. If that reliability is questioned one too many times, the smart business decision is to move on. A raw deal would be staying.

I’m sure Six Apart will come out with some sort of customer rebate offer like they’ve done in the past and apologize profusely for the downtime (they already are), but the damage is done as people are beginning to notice a disturbing pattern emerging. The best thing 6A can do now and in the future is actually fix the issues and not have this happen for a long, long time again.

Obvious yes, but if they have one of these outage problems at any time in the near future things could get really ugly for their business.

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