I moved to Lunarpages in August 2003 and bought a year’s worth of service because they supported Movable Type, the weblog software I was interested in using. A few months ago, they decided, without warning or notice, that they would no longer allow new Movable Type installations. They cited security and performance concerns, though without the sort of details that would actually allow these concerns to be addressed.
They stated that grandfathered MT installations would still be allowed, so I figured that I had until August to find another host. Yesterday, they, without warning, took away my access to the main script that runs my weblog. Needless to say, I am not pleased.
When I went to the Movable Type site to pull down the 3.0 release so I could at least run it on my desktop, I found that they have made drastic changes to the license. They have increased the price, and limited the number of authors and weblogs that can be used by an instance of an installation. Their product Movable Type was definitely in competition with their Typepad service, and the terms of the new license seem calculated to reduce its attraction as an alternative. I am now looking at WordPress, a GPL weblog platform. I practiced installing it on my desktop, then migrated it to my web host. It seems easier to install than Movable Type, but perhaps I am just a lot more practiced at installing web software now.
Movabletype can be an issue for server performance – but I was little surprised by how your webhost approachined this issue with its clients… Nearly every single one of my clients runs Movabletype on my server although I expect a sharp decline over the next month days! 😉
All spelling mistakes because for part of that I couldn’t see what I was typing – I think there is a strange occurance going on in your comments section – extending comments box!