One thing that I have learned in my years of being in this industry is that stuff happens. Servers crash, back ups fail, code gets damaged, etc… Every company goes through a disaster that affects everything. The true character of the company is revealed in how they handle this disaster. Six Apart’s character has been tested, and few companies have ever passed with such flying colors.

In late October the popular blog service Typepad, owned by Six Apart went down. Likely a good sign of the increasingly popularity of blogs. Obviously this is a huge inconvenience to people who really incorporate blogging into their life.

The outage was short lived, and Six Apart was back up in a brief amount of time. The amazing part of this is the way Six Apart decided to deal with the coming fall out of the disaster. They put up a page with the following information:

“We at Six Apart understand that you pay for TypePad and expect to receive superior performance in return. At times over the last several weeks, we have not provided that type of experience. We also know that some customers have been more heavily impacted than others. Therefore, we want to give you the choice of how Six Apart should compensate you for any inconvenience we have caused”

You then have a series of radio boxes you can check to decided how many free days of service you would be willing to accept. I would love to hear how many people selected 15 days, the lowest while still getting something.

This type of accountability is unfortunately rare in business. It’s great to see a company that’s not only innovating technology, but also they way business is run. If you’re looking for a personal hosted blogging platform, I think you know where to go.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 10:47 amand is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.