Insteon, a smart home company whose products include smart light switches, relays, and thermostats, shut its servers without warning last week. The company later posted a message on its website announcing the company had gone into administration. The Insteon Status page says everything you need to know:

I think only the first part of that Venn diagram is relevant now. In what is becoming a predictable order of events, none of their customers were warned that this was happening, and until the message was posted confirming the company went under, Insteon claimed their service was running as normal.

The company used to provide an alternative to Z-Wave and Zigbee through a proprietary networking system cantered around the Insteon hub. Despite this, there are some workarounds. The Home Assistant team has a guide on how to migrate Insteon devices to a self-hosted HASS system, and many users in the now enraged Insteon subreddit have found success with the switch.

Some users who factory reset their hub may think it is bricked, but there is a workaround for this too. 

It's the End, Again

This is becoming an all too familiar story. Companies shutting down abruptly leaving people in the dark happens all the time, but with Smart Home products it is particularly egregious. While most Smart Home hardware has some redundancy built in to allow operation when the network goes down, turning off a system that controls people's lights and heat without warning is pretty shameful.

Let's not forget, Smart Home systems aren't just for young geeks. People put these systems in the homes of elderly parents to automate some of the jobs they may now struggle with.

We've been advocates of Home Assistant for a long time, and highly recommend ditching the cloud for a self-hosted Raspberry Pi Smart Home Hub. There's even dedicated hardware out there like the Home Assistant Amber box that requires almost no setup!

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