alternatives to typepad?

As many readers will know, I use typepad, a hosted blogging service, to publish this blog. I originally chose typepad over other blogging platforms because I thought they had nicer design templates and because I was hoping to, eventually, move off a hosted service and start using Movable Type. MT is made by Six Apart, the same company that makes typepad, so I figured this would be an easy and natural migration path.

Now I’m second guessing my choice to use typepad and, as it’s a product of the same company, thinking I might not move to Movable Type either.

If you visited cybersoc.com yesterday you’ll have noticed that several days worth of content had disappeared along with images and the ability to comment. What you might not know is that I was unable to get into the back end to post an apology, authorise comments, etc. These problems affected all typepad users, including an extremely high traffic experimental blog being written by a BBC presenter. If they can’t keep typepad running, or even explain what happened, than what sort of problems can I expect if I move to movable type in future?

I realise it’s not the end of the world if some of the content on cybersoc.com is unavailable for 24 hours but I’m paying for the service and expect 100% uptime. This isn’t the first time that typepad has been beset with problems and, quite frankly, I’m fed up with their apparent inability to keep the service reliable. To add insult to injury, I’ve noticed that despite the intermittent problems with service recently experienced by their thousands of paying customers, typepad appears to still be paying for their link to appear at the top of the paid links on google searches relating to blogs. Clearly getting more customers isn’t the right way to go about fixing performance and data storage related problems!

So I’m looking for a new blogging platform… if anyone would like to recommend a reliable, easy to use, attractive blogging platform please post your comments here.