A few weeks ago Six Apart, the company that makes TypePad, the service this blog is hosted on ran into both hardware and software problems. Many of their users experienced a number of usability issues. Six Apart was open and straightforward about it from the start. They didn’t run and hide or say the problems didn’t exist.

The founders even told me straight-up what was going on, what they were doing to correct things, and admitted it was their fault and that their paying customers should expect and receive a higher quality of service.

I thought that was solid crisis communications. But then I received the above email. They’re actually giving me the choice to determine how much compensation I should receive based on how my usability was effected by their performance problems.

Other then not being able to access my stats a few time, I didn’t notice much of a change in overall performance. So I didn’t hesitate to select the