I gather from my friends that TypePad had a little issue yesterday. Okay, they were down or sluggish. Blogware has had its share of problems too (Disclosure my personal blog is sponsored by Blogware). Debbie vented her frustrations (here too) and in true Blogosphere style Anil Dash of Six Apart replied in a comment to her post.
I'm not going to bash SA here. There's no point. The blog hosts are all having the same problems scaling. Think about it realistically, how many blogs are created per day? How many posts? Top it off with occasional deluges of comment and trackback spam, and you have a real infrastructure issue to handle. My hat is off to them for working hard to fix and prevent problems.
That being said, blog hosts are only slowly becoming aware that for many of us our blogs are mission critical parts of our marketing, communications, and daily life. When Blogware has been sluggish and I can't update the Qumana blog ... man you don't want to have sensitive ears in my presense for sure. What is needed are improved 
SLAs and hosting for business users. Squarespace is trying to reach this market, but they built a whole new platform (Qumana supports Squarespace, btw)-which means porting things over. Painful at best, terrible failure at worst. I think TP and Blogware need to both improve their architecture and start to offer a higher level of service for business users. Think about the opportunity here ... business users, is your blog critical? Keep everything the same, but pay a small increase in monthly cost for ... benefits.
The other side of it is that many folks are going to start moving to install your own set ups. At Business Blog Consulting we're talking about moving to WP. Seriously. The move wouldn't be that hard ... lord knows we have enough geeks capable of doing it. There is both a threat and opportunity here. Let's see how it all shakes out.
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