At Philly Future Howard asks a good question, Blog Service Downtime: How Much Is Too Much?. Blogger.com, Bloglines, TypePad and others have suffered growing pains these past few months and this week users of TypePad, suffered an outage that due to its scope, caused concerns across the web. One I share with Dave Winer is how this underscores the importance of interop between blogging tools.

As is typical, the negatives get shouted loud and clear and sometimes hard realities, and positives that should be heard get lost in the uproar.

Building systems that people rely on is hard. Building systems that touch the public even harder. I’ve been there (indeed I *am* there) myself. But as Brent says, building weblog systems is especially difficult, “It’s not just hard work, it can be tough on the psyche too – you’re talking about weblogs, which people feel are an extension of themselves. It’s not some boring abstract thing, not at all, it’s about people’s passions. Their lives, really.”

The folks at Six Apart have handled this outage admirably in many ways:

1. No one lost data.

2. They are back online!

3. Six Apart, and Anil Dash in particular, was fantastic at reaching out and being communicative about what was going on, as it was going on. A rare thing for any company. A lot of grace under pressure.

Read Anil’s in-depth interview with Niall Kennedy for example. Niall is community manager for Technorati, which has dealt with, and has solved, scaling/performance issues themselves, so the interview is from one who has faced similar circumstances. Frank and informative.

Personally, while I am a do-it-yourselfer, I have recommended TypePad as a great blog hosting service for folks who need more than what Blogger.com provides. I’m even more likely to do so now.

Update: Correction: I had incorrectly stated Six Apart was giving a 45 day refund. They gave that option to users who suffered with TypePad’s previous service outage. I hope they consider something similar this time around.