SarahInTampa is a highly enjoyable blog about technology, web applications and a myriad of other interesting tidbits, and I have been watching her blog for a long while now. She was even nice enough to link to this site in her sidebar, when it first got started. (Thanks again Sarah!)

Today, she had to post some interesting news though, after nearly four years with TypePad, she will most likely be leaving the hosted blog service.

From her recent blog post:

As you may know, I’m preparing on a site overhaul over the next few months. My designer recommended WordPress to me, but I’ve been happy with TypePad for years and didn’t want to change. However, I ran into a limitation today regarding multiple authors. In TypePad (the Pro plan), you can add authors but you cannot give them control to make any changes to the blog beyond just writing posts. Well, since a co-author and I will be writing for one of the new blogs, I wanted to give him control over the template, too. It seemed I could not do this, but I wanted to make sure. I created a support ticket to confirm. I let TypePad know how important this feature was and that it may be a make-or-break decision for me in my choice of weblog services going forward.

They want me to upgrade to Business Class for this one feature? Business Class starts at $89.95 per month! PER BLOG!!! (Who pays that?!)

It looks like I have no choice now but to leave TypePad.

What is even more shocking to me is that TypePad isn’t bending over backwards to help her solve this, especially since she has been quite vocal about her support of SixApart and their products. Shame on them and another great win for WordPress.

Companies shouldn’t treat bloggers this way. We spread news to a wide audience very fast.

Originally posted on October 4, 2007 @ 12:21 am