Pony.fm gone?

[Pulse Wave 42]

I've discovered just the other day that pony.fm isn't online.

Is it down for maintenance, or is it gone for good without an announcement? If the latter, why?

That'd mean that the last dedicated pony music website is gone.

[Courageous Thunder Dash 7,378]

That's odd. I don't know what's going on but on my end, I'm getting a "No Connection". So it could be that the server may be down...or I don't know. 

 

[NeuroTypical 63]

Oof.  It was up a few weeks ago.

It might be the last of it's kind, but it's not the last pony radio station.

http://ponyvillelive.com/ still has 11 active channels (hopefully Russian Pony Radio can come back - it was fine until Ukraine etc started).

[Twilight Sparkle ✨ 8,249]

Pony.fm is back online! It is very much not gone and there are no plans to shut it down.

There were a couple of extended outages in the last few weeks involving the domain:

1. The first one, in February, was because, the domain ended up not getting renewed on time thanks to a perfect storm of inconvenient coincidences (that weren't and still aren't applicable to any of Poniverse's other domains, in case you're wondering) and it ended up in the so-called "redemption period" where getting it back is an expensive, manual process. I worked closely with the registrar to recover the domain from this state and got the domain back but it took about a week.
2. The second outage, that prompted you to start this thread, @Pulse Wave, was due to the domain somehow expiring retroactively and reverting back into the redemption period state. It's unclear what caused that to happen but the registrar was cooperative in recovering the domain - again. Reactivating the domain was much faster this time but still took a few days.

I hope this sheds some light on what happened. #1 was on me, #2 was on the registrar. Neither outage had anything to do with Pony.fm's viability as a service, as you can see.

 

With all that said, if the day Pony.fm has to close up shop ever comes - and I hope it never does but who knows what world we'll be living in 10, 20, 100, or more years from now - there won't be any ambiguity about it - it will be clearly announced. And, to whatever extent is feasible, that hypothetical future decision to shut it down will be communicated with advance notice and some form of succession plan for maintaining the library we've collectively spent so many hours building.

I recognize the importance of Pony.fm as our last remaining fan-run music hosting service and consider its role as a long-lived historical archive pretty important, too. I wish we had the staff or budget to actively develop new features and such but the site doesn't face any existential dangers.