Will SixApart be sued over TypePad failures
Just catching up on some email here Monday morning (my time) and along with emails from a number of TypePad users who are extremely angry about the ongoing problems with the service, and a number of comments left on site as well, I’ve got an email from a client still using TypePad with a TypePad.com URL suggesting that he is talking to other users about putting together a class action law suit against Six Apart for loss of business and damages caused by the outages. He’s asked not to be named because he doesn’t want his site affected (he tells me it’s working better now) but I will say this: if you must use TypePad for your blogging, get your own domain name, same goes for Blogger or any similar service as well, because at the end of the day its the only way you can minimise any problems if you need to change service providers because you don’t lose the URL address.
It’s likely that Typepad’s terms and conditions are written in such a way that performance is not guaranteed. Consequently a suit of this kind is unlikely to succeed. The fact of the matter is that if you want to guarantee service then your best best is to install MovableType on a server with guaranteed uptime.
To be clear, we do take the standards of the various communities on TypePad very seriously, but there’s no action we can take against people who aren’t users of TypePad but choose to be abusive or offensive to our members.