Hell hath no fury...

...like bloggers getting poor service from their own hosting site!  Typepad, which hosts our blog and those of many others, had an outage today which lasted several hours. And they seem to have lost some of the posts and comments made over the last few days.  This comes just two months after the CEO, Barak Berkowitz, promised they had made several new investments to increase storage and bandwidth.

Looks like they have already lost Jeff Nolan of SAP as a customer. Dennis Howlett shared with me an email he has sent to Barak this afternoon. I imagine there are a number of other annoyed customers.

After the last set of issues, I asked Barak in an email exchange why Six Apart/Typepad was building its own data center when services could be procured from several outsourcing firms. And his response was "for a site of our size running our own servers is important". "Our size" is dwarfed by most Fortune and government sites and they outsource much of this hosting at pretty stringent SLAs

I wrote an article last year titled "Building a "Buy" culture". While that was aimed more at software vendors and Indian services firms, it applies just as much to Typepad.  Barak may need to start buying more than building. He cannot afford more of these service lapses.

Comments

[Tom Foydel]

Vinnie,
We run into this all the time when we are talking to businesses about an SaaS Business Management System (NetSuite in this case). Interestingly enough it is companies in old line businesses who are often more receptive to the idea of outsourcing data storage, server maintenance, backup and disaster recovery operations - which are some of the 'other' benefits NetSuite offers. Companies who are in the new line businesses, including IT services and software, are often reluctant to outsource. The reason you finally get to after an arduous discussion is that they like running the internal IT department. Many of the owners and c level people come out of IT departments and this 'new' business is an opportunity to run the department themselves, which they clearly enjoy, regardless of the business, or technical, consequences. New businesses that are clearly more interested in running their business than in the mechanics of running machines most often choose to outsource. NetSuite has their system hosted by Level 3 Communications and my blog, from MyST Technology Partners, blogsite.com(tm), is hosted by OTC a midwest facility in Ann Arbor, MI.. Why any new Technology company running over the web would want to 'roll their own' can only be explained by the secret desire to look out over the server farm with great pride, much like Mondavi looks out over the Cabernet vines.

[Dennis Howlett]

I've left comments all over the place so I'm probably considered a 6Asplogist but hey - these are important issues.

On my own site, I've been trying to convince readers that a generalised outsourced/SaaS approach to their market could not only transform it but alleviate many problems that today are seemingly intractable. It is a tough job. But I am making progress.

I believe Black Friday is a tipping point. Business that may be teetering on the point of moving to services might be tempted to pull back to the so-called 'safe' in-house option. Or they may look at the services, OSS and social software movement and say 'Ah - new technology = dealing with immature businesses - too risky.' The reasons for failure were in what I call the Scalability 101 category.

I can envisage some CTOs seeing this as a reason to bring order to the OSS skunkworks crews.

But at the end of the day, the economic realties and global influences simply cannot be avoided. If you wish to prosper that is. Explained in those terms, I rather suspect senior execs will see their need to deliver shareholder
value far exceeds any problems in execution against a services strategy.

I hope 6A survives but I rather suspect it has created a bigger problem for itself than it imagines. The geek community which fuels this stuff could just as easily see this as an opportunity to further promote OSS and undermine 6As developer/hoster model.

I just hope this catastrophic failure doesn't lead to the umbrella of services, OSS and social software springing a catastrophic leak.

[Vinnie Mirchandani]

Tom, great analogy. Now if it was Shiraz instead of Cabs, I would volunteer!

Dennis, not sure the average corporate CIO has even heard of Typepad so not sure the ripple effect will hurt OSS initiatives...