Six Apart offers bizarre compensation offerings to customers

Chairman and CEO of SixApart, Barak Berkowitz, owners of the unreliable TypePad blog hosting service has emailed TypePad users with a bizarre offer of between 0 and 45 days free TypePad hosting depending on the level of inconvenience a user has experienced.

If you are a SixApart user, you’ve got to fess up to SixApart based on the following criteria:

While the performance issues caused me some inconvenience I mainly found the service acceptable last month.
Give me 15 free days of TypePad.

The performance issues made it very difficult for me to use the service on multiple occasions during the month.
Give me 30 free days of TypePad.

The performance issues affected me greatly, making my experience unacceptable for most of the month.
Give me 45 free days of TypePad.

I really wasn’t affected and feel I got the great service I paid for last month.
Thank you for the offer, but please don’t credit my account.

Now it wouldn’t take the mentally challenged (I was going to use moron but am trying to be good) to work out that most people are going to pick 45 days, and if you don’t, then bad on you when you are being offered free blog hosting, but the question then arises: how in the world do you describe major disruptions to your blogging activities? I’ll make this warning as there is language ahead, but wouldn’t it have been better this way:

I was mildly angry at the interuptions but I’m too lazy to change to anyone else.
Give me 15 free days of TypePad.

I am seriously, seriously pissed off. I was going to write to all my friends about it, but then again:
Give me 30 free days of TypePad.

You guys suck. The quicker you sell out to a company that actually knows how to run a blog hosting service the better, and you can all go and bite me
Give me 45 free days of TypePad.

I love Mena Trot and have a picture of her naked on my desktop.
Thank you for the offer, but please don’t credit my account.

For those interested, the full text of the email follows:

Two weeks ago I wrote you to explain the problems that some of our users experienced last month and what we were doing to fix them. Today I want to tell you about the work we’ve done and our plans to compensate you for the inconvenience and frustration we may have caused you.

The progress we’ve made

Over the last two weeks we have made great strides. As we recently posted on Mena’s Corner, we have made a number of significant technical changes. We have upgraded hardware throughout the service, we are about to finish installation of a new enterprise-grade data storage device and the move to our new data center is nearly complete. All of this has led to improved performance.

We are not yet perfect. One incident on Tuesday November 8th between approximately 9:00 am and noon Pacific Time caused limited access to the TypePad application. Even with that problem the performance of TypePad, as reported by our customers, our internal systems and the independent Keynote monitoring service, has improved greatly over the last 12 days.

While we are not done with our work, and there is always the chance of outages on any web service, we believe that the worst performance is behind us, and it is now time to focus on how we can make these problems up to you.
Compensation for this less than stellar performance

We are all aware that you pay for TypePad and expect to receive superior service and performance in return. At times last month, we did not provide that type of experience to all our customers and apologies are not good enough.

We also know that some customers have been more heavily impacted than others. If you often use the service on weekdays between 7:00 am and 1:00 pm Pacific Time you may have experienced one or even many periods when you had problems with TypePad’s speed and responsiveness. If you use the service at other times, you may not have experienced any problems at all. After wrestling with these facts and wanting to be fair to all our users we have decided that the only option is to allow you to choose how Six Apart should compensate you.

By default, you will receive a credit for 15 free days of TypePad service. To get this credit you don’t have to do anything; we will just credit your account.

That said, we recognize that customers have had different experiences with the service, so we want to give you the opportunity to choose more, or even less compensation. If you click the link below, you’ll get a screen that offers you the following choices:

· While the performance issues caused me some inconvenience I mainly found the service acceptable last month.
Give me 15 free days of TypePad.

· The performance issues made it very difficult for me to use the service on multiple occasions during the month.
Give me 30 free days of TypePad.

See Also

How to Get More Attention for Your Online Auto Listing

· The performance issues affected me greatly, making my experience unacceptable for most of the month.
Give me 45 free days of TypePad.

· I really wasn’t affected and feel I got the great service I paid for last month.
Thank you for the offer, but please don’t credit my account.
Make your choice now.

If you want to elect for more or less compensation you have until Sunday, November 27th to go to the web address above. By Monday December 5th we will apply either 15 free days or your stated compensation preference to your account. If you are billed monthly, you will notice a gap in charges to your credit card for the number of days you select. If you are billed annually, we will extend your billing cycle by the number of days you select.

The future

I must say that one of the most rewarding aspects of these last three frustrating weeks have been the emails I have received from many of you. A large number of the messages I received were very kind and supportive, and some of you were understandably angry, but you all expressed that you just wanted the service you loved back. Rest assured that we are working night and day to do just that and more.

We are committed to making the service faster and more reliable than it has ever been. With our new data center we now have room to add the capacity we will need to continue our growth while improving performance and adding often requested features.

We will soon roll out a new release of TypePad that will include more controls for comment and TrackBack spam as well more performance improvements. By year end we will do even more to improve TypePad and add the features you have asked for. We are excited to get back to building a great product for you.

Thank you for your patience over the past several weeks and I hope you accept our sincere apologies for the inconvenience we may have caused you.

Sincerely,

Barak Berkowitz
Chairman and CEO
Six Apart, Ltd.