Dear Six Apart,
You are skating on thin ice with me. TypePad, and my blog, was down for most of the day yesterday, and my domain name jasonkolb.com still doesn’t work to access my blog. If you expect to have any kind of significant lifespan as a Software as a Service business, you had better get your act together. I have been involved in data centers for a long time now, and the explanation you posted was completely unsatisfactory. As a paying customer, I want to know what you are doing right now to prevent this kind of outage in the future. If you had a RAID failure, I want to know what kind of SAN you are buying. If you had a network failure, I want to know where you are putting a redundant point of presence. If someone hacked your database, I want to know what you are doing to shore up security. Simply saying that you were down and you’re sorry doesn’t cut it when I’m paying you a monthly fee to be available. An apology instills no confidence in me that this won’t happen again.
This kind of event puts a black eye on the hosted business model which is a shame, because there are many responsible companies out there that maintain SLA’s, run tight data centers, and give their customers relevant information when they have problems. The way you handled this incident was unprofessional and amateurish.
If you don’t take steps to rectify this situation you will be losing me as a customer very shortly.
Sincerely,
Jason Kolb
