It feels a lot like I’m writing a eulogy for the Web 2.0 era at the moment. Some of my more recent posts have been about the closure of Ello, Keen and Tastebuds.fm. And now Typepad is shutting down at the end of the month.
Originally launched in 2003, Typepad was a simple blogging platform, along the lines of Blogger (launched in 1999), and the hosted version of WordPress (also 2005). Launched by Six Apart, it’s currently owned by Endurance International Group, who also own Bluehost, Hostgator, Yoast SEO and lots more.
I’ve never really used Typepad myself, having gone from Blogger in my very early days to self-hosted WordPress. But after finally starting to go back through old posts and archives on my sites in a bit of housekeeping, it’s noticeable how many people I know who used it ‘back in the day’.
And there are a number of people posting that they’ve experienced issues trying to export their content to upload to other platforms at the moment. That’s causing some stress with the deadline of September 30th, 2025 for Typepad to be completely shut.
It’s sad for anyone that loses their archive, and the fact that it adds to the huge amount of link rot on the internet. If you’re using a standard .typepad.com URL, then you won’t be able to redirect it, and even many of the people using custom domains years ago have either let them lapse, or not put any redirects in place (intentionally or not) meaning that anything mentioning those old articles will be broken.
Letting old content disappear is even encouraged as part of pruning sites, reducing crawl budgets etc. And it’s certainly something which can produce benefits for search rankings, but at the same time as someone who values history it’s sad to see somewhere between 30-50% of pages and links disappear over the course of a decade.
I’d always recommend self-hosting any site, as it gives you much more control over the domain and host, especially if you make sure you’re constantly backing up and exporting everything. And it’s pretty cheap – you can always give me a shout for cost-effective solutions.
And if you are pruning old content, you should always try and redirect anything with value to a relevant page/post that will still be operational.
That includes your entire domain if you’ve decided to rebrand etc, otherwise you might find yourname.com becomes a home of casino spam etc. Sometimes hidden amongst legitimate articles, or alternatively just replacing whatever was there before.
It’s also sad to see so many longstanding Web 2.0 era services slowly disappear. Even at the time, a lot of startups didn’t make it past their early months, but in 2025 it feels like many of the social web aspects have disappeared in favour of a tiny number of walled gardens operated by a handful of monolyths, just as in traditional print, film, TV etc. While I’m still hopeful and optimistic about the Fediverse, it feels that if younger internet users are spoonfed everything by the likes of Google, Apple, Meta, ByteDance and xAI, then they’ll never realise the joy of creating and owning your projects, connecting with people outside of closed networks, building and collaborating, and all the stuff that made the internet a fun and inspiring place.
