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.