Why Blogger?

With all the press this week about Blogger.com getting hacked there has been a major outcry about how lax the service and security is and at the end of seemingly every story and blog post is, "you should move to Movable Type" because it is decentralized. We seem to forget that websites get hacked. GeoCities (when it was still cool) got hacked, Netscape (when all the smart people still worked there) got hacked, Nike, FOX TV, Microsoft, TheForce.Net, Whitehouse.gov, CIA and countless other sites all get hacked and we move on. When Blogger gets hacked, people seem to lose all perspective and forget that high profile sites are constantly under attack.
I pay $50 CDN a year for Blogger Pro. It hasn't been a perfectly smooth ride. For the first couple of months the new code of Blogger Pro wouldn't publish to my server and even now it flakes out when they are tinkering with things. Each of my e-mail to them was answered and they did a good job of keeping me up to date about the problem. Until they had it fixed the backup server worked nicely. All along the service has been reliable, fast and has been worth it. The customer support has been excellent when I have had a question and the service has worked as well as any of my other web services that I use. CI HOST took months to get a timeout feature on our POP3's at Lakeview fixed. Amazon.com has lost a book or two in shipping to my house and took a week to get their e-book servers up recently when I had bought one. Blogger responsed to the hack as fast as they could and had everything resolved within a couple of hours. What more could you ask. Did they screw up? Yes. Did they fix it as soon as they could. It appears that way. Yes I know Moveable Type will install in 20 minutes and has a commenting feature that is faster than YACCS but for now Blogger has lived up to their promises to me and has delivered on what they have said they would which makes for an excellent business relationship.
The regular Blogger may be the greatest of all web services ever. Wendy uses it for her blog and it is as reliable as the Pro servers. We use the free service and the API for Hockey Pundits and I haven't heard a complaint for months. After a day of criticism and controversy, Blogger is still one of the greatest web services of all time and I can't recommend them enough.