FOOD FOR THOUGHT Onsite vs Hosted solution

[Brianmac]

Can anyone give their pro's/con's on hosted vs on site PiaF servers?

I am partial to onsite, but I know a lot of people here like hosted. Just looking for some feedback...

Thanks,
Brian

 

[matthew]

I think the line is rather blurred these days. A hosted solution will often have more than just one system hosted. That means they can take advantage of bigger bandwidth, redundant links, virtualisation and failover, standby power, skilled staff, and so on. Onsite, you have to do all that yourself.

 

[Huckda]

assuming you aren't using any copper telco lines and it's 100% VoiP .. if your internet goes down you're hosed internal and external(correct me if wrong)...
onsite you internal will still work if internet goes down but your network is still up...often the case in my comcast world

 

[phonebuff]

One other factor to consider - What's the nature of the calling pattern.

If much of your calling is station to station, or multiple stations joining calls then you may be better with on site, as each station uses bandwidth and depending on your ISP you can easily eat this up with just internal calls when you host.

 

[synack]

I would dare to say that if you need to ask the question, the answer is onsite. There are so many variables involved with hosted, unless you are well versed in SIP/Internet/Firewalls/QoS etc you should steer clear for anything more than a handful of sets or testing.
For instance. What happens with the Internet goes down? Is a complete outage fine? How much bandwidth do you need? What else is sharing this internet? How performant is the Hosted service provider? How many sets can you run before your VPS gets overloaded? Are your resources dedicated or shared?

 

[bobmats]

biggest con for offsite is security.
You have to keep your server behind a firewall, only give certain ip's access. Keep this very strict.
pbxinaflash does have tools to support this and set this up, but there is Always a risk.

We had some misue in the past.
To also prevent this we were only using prepaid suppliers. This would mean damage could not be higher than the prepaid amount. This does mean you have to watch your prepaid balance.

Pro for offsite is that when your own internet connection goes down you can divert call to ceelphone and people can still reach you.

 

[Brianmac]

"Pro for offsite" can't you have your incoming call go to a failover phone number(cell, etc...) if the provider cannot reach the PBX server?

 

[synack]

"Pro for offsite" can't you have your incoming call go to a failover phone number(cell, etc...) if the provider cannot reach the PBX server?

I also believe that. I use voip.ms and they definitely have, and I definitely use, a fail-over route.