That's right, readers. I am sad to say that TypePad is gone. I'm someone who's had a long history with web design, and whelp, the day has finally come, friends. Six Apart's last remaining US property is gone.
I mean, we knew this was coming for a while, but it's still kind of tragic to see a pillar of the old web just fade away.
In October 2003, only two years after Benjamin and Mena Trott founded Six Apart, Ltd., Joi Ito, a Japanese venture capitalist, helped the company expand beyond just Movable Type (a tool I still use to this day on side projects such as "The Nulled State"), but I need to get back on track.
At its peak, TypePad was basically a paid service for hosted Movable Type blogs and was used by so many outlets such as MSNBC, Time, Wired Magazine, BBC, and Sky News, just to name a few.
Sadly, at the end of 2020 TypePad suddenly stopped accepting new signups and started directing people to Bluehost, a provider I could easily rant about another time.
At first I thought maybe Six Apart's Japanese branch might step in and take over TypePad, in the same vein as Rambler Media Group, the Russian web portal company that bought Six Apart's moody high-schooler blog platform LiveJournal back in December 2007.
I hate how we've become such a monoculture where everything is stuck on a handful of sites, or we all just use WordPress, which is run by Matt Mullenweg (aka photomatt), who owns Automattic, who run Gravatar (the profile picture backbone of a huge number of sites) and has been mismanaging the corpse of Tumblr. Other than WordPress, you've got what? Ghost?
I mean, I love Ghost, but it's a bit bloated at times, though it does have great ActivityPub support. I would have loved if it were a little lighter on CPU too.
Sorry, got off track again. Let me get back to TypePad being gone, and what can be done for the indie web. Turns out Six Apart Japan is still around, and MovableType is still a very real option for personal blogs, dear readers.
If you're considering Movable Type as an indie web blogging platform, the free personal license is more generous than it first appears, though it does have real boundaries.
A single installation supports unlimited sites, unlimited users, and unlimited commenters. Affiliate links are fine, and the terms explicitly carve out space for incidental income, donations, and tip jars without treating you as a commercial operation.
The big no-go is using it for a non-profit, a company, a store, or anything along those lines. But for personal use, you can absolutely run MovableType 9, which as of April 8, 2026 is still being actively updated.
Honestly, give MovableType 9 a shot for your personal site. It's really easy to get started. Just use Google Translate on the download page, and the installer will default to English on most machines. Otherwise, in your mt-config.cgi file, just add:
DefaultLanguage en_US
That's all it takes. Give it a shot and thank me later.