It appears Typepad has been down for a while (since last night?). On 6/11/04, Everything Typepad! posted a "Scheduled Downtime June 12, 2004" which said the service would be down for maintenance from 12:00am to 2:00am - likely less. It's 8:12am EST and it's still down. Oops.
In my experience, all hosted software providers experience unexpected downtime - often early as they are ramping their service. I remember Ebay's 12 hour outage, Critical Path's two day outage, and a variety of hosting services taking thousands of sites off-line. You can almost see the technical people staring at the computers mumbling to themselves "Oh shit - I can't get this back up - something's toast and I can't figure it out - beepers going off - panic sets in - sweat - focus - the magic reboot dance and incantation - nothing - guess I've got to call the boss in the middle of the night and share my stress with him".
Hopefully the folks Six Apart / Typepad do the right thing after the successfully restore their service. IMHO, the right thing is:
1. Apologize profusely to their customers.
2. Provide one month of free service if it's down for a substantial period of Saturday.
This would generate huge goodwill. Acknowledging a problem like this is important to building long term trust with your customers (I saw some posts on Trust yesterday, but alas, they are on Typepad hosted sites that I can't link to right now). Typepad should be clear this is not an "entitlement" in the future, but instead should thank their earlier users with this type of acknowledgement.
COMMENTS (1)
Brad,
This highlights a difference between web services and mobile telecom data services. In the mobile telcom world if you ran a service like this and you went down, you could be liable to the mobile operator for millions of Euros. You are required to sign a contract stating you can guarentee "5 nines" (uptime of 99.999%) or be liable for the millions.
Why did Typepad fail to put in failover redundancy? Plenty of colo facilities provide it and much more. That's just plain dumb deplyoment.
I develop mobile imaging infrastructure software and thus know a thing or two about this stuff.
Cheers,
Douglass Turner
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