Tech

(Disclaimer: Long, rambling post ahead. This originally started as a comment in response to some comments on this post and others I’ve seen in the past day. This probably isn’t my best written or most coherent rant ever, but here it is.)

Since the official feature and pricing list for TypePad went up yesterday evening, I’ve seen quite a few people grousing about TypePad being overpriced, especially for the Pro package. I don’t think it’s overpriced at all, and will be quite happily signing up for an TypePad Pro account.

First off, about this “free MovableType” that people keep referencing. Sure, MT can be legally downloaded and used for free — however, it’s far better to give a donation if you continue to use it. I’ll save the ranting on the current desire for everything to be free for later, but for now, suffice to say that I’m of the belief that purchasing the software you use regularly is a good thing. The Trotts have put incredible amounts of time and effort into creating what I feel is the best blogging back end application available, and I quite happily sent in a donation to pay for my MT license.

Now, about my present server situation. I’ve been running my personal website, including a MT powered blog, off of my own computer in my apartment for years now. In other words, essentially free, without even the costs of paying for a hosting provider. Theoretically unlimited disk space (as long as I can add new drives, I won’t run out of space). No monthly bandwidth cap. No ads. No limitations on what I can do with my site (I could, in theory, run a porn server without any hassle. It’s a direction I’ve never wanted to go, but I could). My only sacrifices are that my transfer speed is somewhat limited by my DSL line (which, when dealing with text and images, isn’t much of a sacrifice at all over a T1-speed DSL connection), and I don’t have a top-of-the-line server, so it’s not always the speediest on the ‘net (again, though, the majority of the time this isn’t even noticed when just serving text and graphics).

So, I’ve been living with most of the benefits of paying for a hosting service, without the costs, and with the added benefits of having total control over my webserver. I can tweak Apache’s http.conf file to my heart’s content. I can install any number of CGI scripts, SQL databases, or other toys without limit. I don’t even have to deal with uploading and downloading files to my site — all I have to do is copy from one directory on my computer to another, and everything’s good to go.

Why in the world, then, would I want to pay $15/month (not counting any discounts I get for being a TypePad beta tester) to relinquish that amount of control over my site?

Quite a few reasons, actually.

First off, when did $15 become so horridly expensive a price? That’s nothing. It’s the price of an evening at the movies (ticket plus drink and snack) for one person. It’s what, two and a half decent sized coffee’s from Starbucks? Less than the price of having a single medium Domino’s pizza delivered to your door. Less than three packs of cigarettes, if you’re a smoker (and heavy smokers can go through that in a day, let alone a month). These days, it’s less than a full tank of gas.

Next, everything you get with your account. Merely looking at the feature list doesn’t really convey how completely cool some of these features are. You get all the functionality and benefits of a MovableType installation (plus quite a few) without having to bother with the installation itself, without having to worry about which Perl modules are or aren’t installed (Do I have access to Image::Magick? If not, can I get it installed? What about the alternatives?), without having to worry about your hosting provider throttling MT when it tries to grab processor time during a rebuild. Basically, without any of the issues that running your own installation can present. Now, admittedly, for many people, these issues are trivial, and easily dealt with — I’ve faced and conquered quite a few myself — but many other people aren’t going to want to have to worry about things like this.

You also get the extras that are built into TypePad, some of which have been covered this week during the Five Days of TypePad series. Simple, built-in moblogging, allowing you to quickly and easily post from your cell phone, PDA, or by e-mail — a feature I haven’t played with, but other people have said good things about. Amazingly easy photo albums. TypeLists, which have made maintaining the sidebars on this website incredibly easy — the four blogrolls on the right, and the ‘Destinations’, ‘Bookshelf’, and ‘Noises’ lists on the left are all TypeLists.

Beyond all that, there’s the interface itself. The template builder makes the basic layout and design of a simple weblog ridiculously easy: choose a basic layout style, which features you want displayed, and drag and drop them into place. If you want to go beyond the basics, you have access to the source code, complete with all of the MovableType template tags you’re already used to using, and you can tweak and customize to your hearts content. I could easily have duplicated the design and style of my old weblog here at TypePad if I’d wanted to, however it was more fun to play with the built-in tools until I got a basic design that I liked, then go into the code to tweak it from there, with an end result that I like better than what I had before.

Also, for me (and this is somewhat specific to my situation), the speed is a definite improvement. As I mentioned above, my home server isn’t the speediest in the word. While this doesn’t affect me much for simple page serving, it does tend to show a little bit when people are leaving comments on my site, and it shows more for me on the administration end when I’m navigating within the MT interface. By moving to TypePad, everything’s far speedier to work with — combine that with the ease of use of the new interface, and it’s well worth it.

Now, there are a few things that I’m giving up in order to move over here. TypePad users don’t have the ability to muck around directly with the source code of the back end software. This precludes using some of the hacks that involved tweaking the MovableType source code. Adding MovableType plug-ins is also not an option. For some people, this is going to be a very strong and valid reason not to use TypePad — there are a lot of very impressive, very powerful hacks and plug-ins available for MovableType. Some of these I’ve used, and losing their functionality is a little disappointing — however, the majority of the time (for me), they fell into the “here’s a neat trick, I’m going to play with it for a while” category, and not the “this is functionality that I don’t want to live without” category, so I’m willing to lose those specific bells and whistles for the new bells and whistles I get to use here at TypePad.

In the end, for me, the benefits far outweigh any disadvantages. That may not be the case for everyone, and I realize this — however, I think that the complaint that TypePad is overpriced is silly at best, and almost offensively self-centered at worst. There are already a good few years of development sunk into MovableType, plus the extra time and effort that has been put into scaling MovableType up into a public service like TypePad. Is all that time worth nothing at all? From the number of people declaring how they’ll stay with MovableType because it’s free, it seems that that seems to be a very prominent (and sad) attitude.

For myself, though, I’ve paid for MovableType, and I’m going to pay for my continued residence here at TypePad. For me, the features are worth it, the ease of use is worth it, and I’m supporting the hard work that Ben and Mena (and Anil, Brenna, and anyone else at Six Apart) have put into MovableType over the years. They’ve done an incredible job with the services and software packages that they offer, and I’m happy to stick with them.

So I’m staying. :)