In the olden days, publishing a site on the Internet required that you figure out hosting and have at least some experience with HTML, CSS, and the other languages that make the Internet work. But the emergence of blogging and "Web 2.0" sites in the late '90s and early 2000s gave rise to a constellation of services that would offer to host all of your thoughts without requiring you to build the website part of your website.
Many of those services are still around in some form—someone who really wanted to could still launch a new blog on LiveJournal, Xanga, Blogger, or WordPress.com. But one of the field's former giants is shutting down—and taking all of those old posts with it. TypePad announced that the service would be shutting down on September 30 and that everything hosted on it would also be going away on that date. That gives current and former users just over a month to export anything they want to save.
TypePad had previously removed the ability to create new accounts at some point in 2020. It gave no specific rationale for the shutdown beyond calling it a "difficult decision." As recently as March of this year, TypePad representatives were telling users there were "no plans" to shut down the service.