Six Apart (the creators of TypePad and Movable Type) have today announced two new business oriented blogging products – ‘TypePad Business Class’ (a hosted service aimed at companies with high-traffic Web sites) and ‘Movable Type Enterprise’.
Their press release explains further:
‘According to Six Apart, TypePad Business Class offers advanced customization for layout control, advanced comment and spam controls, unlimited blogger accounts, additional bandwidth allowances and premium technical support.
TypePad Business Class is available immediately, starting at $89.95 per blog per month, for 4GB of storage and 40GB of bandwidth per month.
Movable Type Enterprise extends database support to the Oracle 10g database, integrates with enterprise authentication tools such as LDAP, and offers unlimited blogs.’
Maybe decent for a company.
But pointless for the entrepreneur blogger: we’re much better off with payed hosting and CMS of choice.
[…] I saw this on ProBlogger, which links to an article at Publish. I couldn’t find anything about it at Six Apart’s site. […]
“advanced customization for layout control, advanced comment and spam controls”
That’s a bummer. To me, business class should entail more bandwith, better support, etc. But the features quoted above (especially spam control and advanced comment control) should be a part of any of their Typepad paid services. It almost sounds like us “Pro” account users don’t really have good “spam” or “comment” control now, or they are obsolete…
Oh well, can’t win ’em all….
Vic
I am currently in the process of moving one of my two blogs from Typepad due to the recent spate of reliability problems. It’s off to the vibrant, community supported WordPress for F1 Prospects.Com.
Whew, that’s a bit steep on the monthly outlay for what you’re actually getting. Only 4BG of storage. I suppose for a company this may be well suited for them, but WordPress is just too good and being Open Source, you just can’t beat it. I don’t see this being a very lucrative development for them.
Excellent idea to offer a pro service. 90$ is nothing for a pro service forget about GB!!! I have very small customers like doctors for whom I produce “homepages” based on geeklog.net blog / CMS software. I also host them because they don`t know who else to ask and I just realize that I must charge a little more soon…
What do pros also need? Lets hear what you think!
I`d say:
– a sound forum adding to the comments
– an excellent autoresponder instead of a standard news list crap
– a groupware tool in the background with calendar, things to do, task planing etc.
– a highly available and mirrored server in case one crashes or is interrupted
– a ticketing system for incoming emails
– experts to help