After strong criticism from TypePad users, SixApart’s Ben Trot has responded by (to his credit) apologising for the problems with the service, but also admitting that the company over extended itself.
In a post on his wife’s blog, Trott writes:
For some background: TypePad-hosted blogs are, to say the least, incredibly popular, and growing at an incredible rate. We’re currently pushing about 250mbps of traffic through our multiple network pipes, and that’s growing by 10-20% each month. (If you’re more familiar with bandwidth stated in terms of transfer allowances, that’s a transfer rate of almost 3TB (terabytes!) per day.) And because TypePad customers are so invested in their blogs, we see activity on the service-both reading & writing-that equals services with 100 times the number of users on TypePad.
Because of the growth of the service, we’ve been increasing our capacity steadily, but a few months ago the data center we are in ran out of space and power, limiting the amount of equipment we could add. After some shopping, we found a great new data center and have been building it out for over a month. We’re currently in the middle of that move, and that’s when the trouble started.
The question then is: if you ran out of space and were having problems, why did you continue to take on new customers during this period? Surely a responsible business with serious capacity issues would have closed their doors to new business to assure that its current clients were taken care of.
Its called greed.
Responding to criticism and not being upfront and honest about a serious problem in the first place doesn’t really bide well for SixApart’s overall trust factor with the blogging community now, does it?. It could literally make a Dilbert cartoon….had the Dilbert blog been contactable on the day of launch.