This question answers itself.

Once upon a time I used to put memory upgrades in myself, and flip DIP switches to change functions on the machine language level (if that's the right lingo).

Now I just turn the thing on and off. And write stuff, which is what I wanted it for.

nooooo!!
The stupid PRC won't let me look at Typepad websites.

Whatever is best for you and this precious website, but I do worry about change though I am supposed to be arguing on the absoluteness of change. Be kind to those who worry about technology tossing them aside.

livejournal.com?

They all look the same in Bloglines.....

I've been running a number of private class blogs and semi-private other blogs on TypePad for the past 18 months. (URLs available, Brad, by email if you want a preview). Before that I too rolled my own and did all kinds of other strange stuff. I'm real pleased. Good support and, I believe, all the features you have currently implemented. It's very cheap, too. Highly recommended.

As you, being an economist, surely know, it depends on how much of your time is spent on server type issues and whether that time is worth $5 a month to you. For most people, that time probably worth it. Probably true for you as well (unless you can blackmail a student into doing the administrative stuff).

However, it does seem to me that most of the difficulty and effort with MT compared to TypePad is in setup. Once you're past that, I can't see there being too much of a time savings except for upgrades, which you've just recently gone through anyway. So unless you're still seeing some nagging issues (like the comment preview thing), you might be better off delaying a switch until you really need/want to upgrade again.

I did use TypePad briefly, and decided on MT because I wanted to tailor my archives much more than than it would let me. I was otherwise pretty impressed and always recommend it to new bloggers.

I think you have more alternatives than that, and are leaving out an even more attractive alternative.

Questions: How much time do you spend as a sysadmin? How quick are you at keeping patchers to the OS or to MT up to date? How quick are you at installing spam filters? Do you have the resources to defend against DDOS attacks (I'd say no as you really need to be at a very nicely peered ISP to do that, or have the connections of a very nicely peered ISP). How important is your blog/website? What would be the downside to an outage of 12 hours? 24 hours? 48 hours? 96 hours? How often do you backup your system? Answer these questions and then you can determine how good a sysadmin you are under not so good conditions, and balance that against how valuable your blog is. (Hint, I think you're a fair to middling poor sysadmin under the best of conditions, which you shouldn't take offense at, it's not your forte, and you don't have the right resources.)

If the choice was typepad vs. diy at this point, I'd say typepad is the clear winner.

Another considerations: in my experience, people that focus only on X, sometimes know a great deal about X, but lose the ability to generalize from X to the real world, or see the impacts of the real world on X, thus actually lessening the value of their work on X. If you believe this to have any truth, it may just be that being a fair to middling poor sysadmin may make you even more valuable as an economist. DIY wins!

Final consideration, an interesting alternative. If you're hosted at Berkeley, than why not do some undergraduate ee, j school or b school students a favor and let them become unpaid interns whose job is to keep your site up, and help produce it.

I'd say it would be a very good way for a j school or b school student to learn about IT, to learn about what it takes to keep a system alive, and even what network engineering, and security is all about. It would be a way for you to influence those professions(?) as well as a way for you to oversee the whole affair, thus helping provide you the real world experience that your having been a fair to middling poor sysadmin has given you. Without your having to do the actual work. (Just make sure you have frequent and TESTED backups!)

I'm biased, of course, (I work for the company that makes both TypePad and MT) but these days I recommend TypePad for everyone but professional web folks or businesses, because it's just so much less hassle. Yay for less hassle.

"because it's just so much less hassle. Yay for less hassle."

It's also less control, though, and Typepad doesn't provide information on its homepage about what it will charge for a site which consumes as much bandwidth as this one is likely to go through in a typical month - a heck of a lot more than 5 GB/month, I'm sure. Still, I expect that it would still work out cheaper for Brad in the end, however outrageous the sum might be, given the opportunity cost of his spending time doing site administration.

Although it only impacts me when I try and read this blog from a computer at my wife's school, I'll second green apron monkey's concerns about web filtering limiting access to mass-hosting setups. The district filter at my wife's school allows access to your blog (thanks for keeping the dialog on the high ground), but has blocked some of the pages to which you've linked. This is an unfortunate and likely consequence of hosted solutions...if one tenant is unscrupulous, all will suffer from guilt by association.

Well let me throw my hat in the ring and say that I am decidedly undecided about a blog move. But I do appreciate your attempt at stakeholder engagement!

If the blog keeps posting, and the commentators keep commenting, I'm sure we'll be okay.

sz - who wonders why anyone would try to make an argument for switching or not switching based on economics. Blogs seem to fall into the category between art and entertainment, and thus would never appeal to Homo Economus.

Good, maybe Typepad won't support the "feature" of delayed postings as an "antispam" measure /sarcasm.

Oops - I posted in a different thread a minute ago and got this:

In an effort to curb malicious comment posting by abusive users, I've enabled a feature that requires a weblog commenter to wait a short amount of time before being able to post again. Please try to post your comment again in a short while. Thanks for your patience.

I will be a false positive patient (hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...)

I'm a LiveJournalist myself. I guess you'd lose the ability to edit stuff into line in others' comments there, though. You would, on the other hand, gain the ability to "screen" comments from unfamiliar users (such that they aren't made visible til you approve them) to screen or fully block comments from unregistered users, and you'd still be able to delete comments from trolls.

Oh, and I'd like to add one other advantage of LJ -- responses to comments are threaded, and replies are mailed to the person who is replied to. Personally, I would find this tremendously useful. I am but an amateur in econ, and I ask questions here and there. I'd love to actually get notified when people post answers. (Currently, I just search back through the most recent twenty-or-so entries to browse for new comments, and to remind myself what questions haven't been addressed yet, so I can find another opportunity to ask 'em. It's sometimes interesting, because some unrelated thread will've gotten going, but it's definitely more time-consuming...)

Typepad would make sense for your blog, since you don't do anything fancy with it. However, I noticed that your webserver has a lot of non-blog content that would not port to TypePad very well.

So I'm assuming that you would still have to maintain a server, and I think it would actually be hard to have it where your server has the same domain name and so does your Typepad weblog. It's not technically impossible, but I doubt Typepad will help you out in setting that up. Regardless of what you do, it is likely that you will break a lot of relative links in the process of moving.

One thing that might make sense is renting out space on a server that is maintained by someone else. That way you don't have to mess with backups, file dependencies, and can just focus on web publishing.

From an economic perspective and as a typepad user myself, I would encourage you to make the switch.

Purely because if more users sign on to typepad, I can hope that economies of scale would pad typepads margins and the savings will be evident to me in the form of lower fees and/or better services.

From a features standpoint, having a hosted service was what convinced me to accept fewer features and a higher cost than using Moveable Type. Blogs using MT seem to be just a little bit better in my opinion.

Personally, I have no knowledge of what sort of service derives you the most pleasure and satisfaction and must be answered yourself.

Typepad, like Blogspot, is a single point of failure. All it takes is one power failure (or one court order), and you are hosed along with thousands of other users.

I keep my own blog on my own server, under my own direct control.

Well, whether it's your server or TypePad's server, it's still a single point of failure (and thus, you ought to back up your blog regularly either way).

In the past, Brad, people have had trouble with the responsiveness of your own server, which would count in favour of making the switch. The days of timeouts and resultant double-posts seem somewhat past, though.

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