Typepad

I need to take a moment to vent.

I have been a Typepad user for right at a year now.  For the first 6 months or so, I was a typepad evangelist.  The service was stellar, and the features were, for my use, top notch.

Anyone who's on the service knows that, over the course of the last few months, this hasn't been the case.  Typepad's service has been spotty at best, with many of the features not operating properly.

My lack of blogging has been a result of this over the past few days.

It began with, as my yearly subscription ran out, an inability to make the transaction involved in renewing it.  The card I had on file was my bank card which my bank has sense changed.  After the initial notification that my card didn't go through, I immediately went in and changed the information over.

After several days, I noticed no action on either my bank account or on my Typepad account.  I opened a help ticket with Typepad, mentioning that the change to my account seemed to go unnoticed, and I wanted to make sure the transaction went through so my account would not get suspended.  The response was rudimentary and offered no help.

So, it came as little surprise when, Sunday, I tried to log into my account only to find that it had been suspended.

Anyone who has spent any amount of time reading about Internet business knows that the cornerstone of any successful dotcom is a reliable and secure money exchange or credit card processing system.  Six Apart's inability to navigate a simple transaction caused an interruption in my account.

I, of course, used the only recourse available to me and opened another help ticket.  At the moment, that was a rather less than satisfactory option, as responses to help tickets have normally taken 2-3 days.  I still haven't heard from them, yet.

However, today I signed on to find that my account had been restored.  This was a welcome development until, barely an hour later, I was unable to access the service because they were, apparently, suffering from a service outage.

Now, it's troubling to me when I have to visit the Six Apart Status page (go check it out, to see the the many outages that have occurred over the past several months) more often than I visit the service itself.

This has been explained, several times, as the cost of Typepad's successful growth.  That's fine, and I'm happy for them that they've managed to make enough money to warrant such growth.  But, I'm paying a decent amount of cash for this service, and don't believe that I'm getting my money's worth for a service which is only occasionally available.

As I mentioned, the only way to contact Typepad is through help tickets.  I've opened up many of them over the past 3 or 4 months, each of which have indicated an increasing dissatisfaction for the service I've received.  This has fallen on deaf ears.

So, perhaps saying how dissatisfied I am publicly will help jump start the situation.

Comments

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