A server problem stopped smart pet-feeding device Petnet from working yesterday.
The company issued a statement urging its customers to use alternative methods of feeding their pets due to its technical issues. Pets whose owners were unable to make alternative feeding arrangements were left hungry.
Petnet said at the time: "We are experiencing some difficulties with one of our third-party services. This is currently being investigated, and we will provide you with more information as we receive it from our partners.
"You may experience a loss of scheduled feed and failed remote feedings. Please ensure that your pets have been fed manually until we have resolved this issue."
In theory, Petnet users can schedule and control feeding through a smart bowl and a smartphone app. But that was not possible during yesterday’s downtime.
The incident serves as an indication that, as important as secure, reliable web hosting is to our lives at present, it is going to become increasingly vital as the internet of things becomes prevalent.
While server outages and other hosting errors might take our favourite website offline or delay our ability to work, in the future they will have the potential to completely derail our lives. With things such as home security, heating and even vehicles potentially being partly controlled by apps, server problems could have devastating effects.
In many ways that is a daunting prospect. The lack of care and consideration currently given to hosting by many companies does not bode well for the future. On the flip-side, you would like to think that the potential for causing business-destroying carnage would convince the decision-makers in the next generation of tech startups to give as much thought to hosting as to other key aspects of the business.
Time will tell if that proves to be the case.
