Hello i have a small home business. trying to keep up with freepbx and modules updating as well as security. I was wondering if it would be better to put it on one of the freepbx cloud hosting compnaies that offer this type of service as well as support they would do all the backups, update sa well if the system fails. Because 2 times my system has die on me. And i really don’t have the time to replace it or fix it as well as keeping up with everthing.
What does the community think, I know the monthly cost will be there but it would save me a lot of headaches. I’m just trying to get a second opinion.
Take the cost of a ‘cloud FreePBX’ lets agree on $72.00 per year. Lets guess your server is using 100 watts per hour and electricity costs you 10 cents per kilowatt hour, that’s 24 cents a day and so $87.60.
Using a hosted phone system solution that someone else maintains will cost you even more than using a VPS for yourself.
This should be expected. If someone wants to pay my company to maintain patches and updates, I have to cover our overhead of logging into the system, verify a backup/snaphot, run system updates, run module updates, reboot FreePBX, and finally reboot phones.
Edit: As much as I love and use FreePBX, this is why I tell people that for systems with only a handful of extensions, it is more cost effective to use solutions like Ring Central. It is simple math.
I use Google Cloud for my FreePBX. I am very happy with the setup. I had no issue / interruption of service during the past year. I can restore from backup in 15 minutes or less. Initially my PBX was hacked because it was open to the world. I learned my lesson and I wrote a How-To tutorial based on my experience that will secure the FreePBX and restore from backup in case of disaster. Google provide $300 to be used during the first year. After that if you only have few extension then you could use a f1-micro compute engine and make your FreePBX “FREE”. Good luck.
Hello just a update. We will be moving out freepbx over to a hosting company. it makes more sense then to host it our sense and when it goes down it’s a nightmare. The cost is a little more then i would like to spend. But in the long run not having to check on the server every day and making sure it didn’t crash or hardware problems is better to get it hosting by a hosting company.
I called a few and one thing i don’t know if which ports need to be open i know port 22 for the ssh is needed i know port 80 is for the web interface but we changed that default port to another port. But there i believe port 5060 is there anything else I’m missing?
