Yesterday I was having a conversation with our Communications Team, and Kathy asked me about my opinion of pay vs. free blogs. My answer? If you are using a blog in the commercial sense (we were talking about all of our Management Team members mainting blogs…I would consider that commercial use…) then a pay service is superior for several reasons. One things I did not take into account in the pay vs. free discussion is up time.
I tried to log into some blogs that I follow through BlogSpot, and I was suprised to see that they are down…ALL of them are down. I went to the root URL and saw a maintenance sign. They have scheduled downtime in the middle of the day for an hour and a half! BlogSpot is free, so what are people going to do? Complain? Switch services? Doubtful. BlogSpot is the best free service, IMHO, so the users are stuck with what they get.
If Typepad went down for an hour and a half in the middle of the day you can bet they would get a TON of flack about it. And yes, they would probably lose PAYING customers. That is why I would be very surprised to see Typepad schedule maintenance in the middle of the day…it just wouldn’t fly.
You get what you pay for.