Should I use two FreePBX servers or one?

General Help
1

I take care of a growing customer care call center and a growing staff.

Right now, everyone is using FreePBX installation and while the “server” (re-purposed PC) is handling the load nicely, I’m concerned that it won’t for long.

I am also starting to allow remote, off-site connections to connect to FreePBX making me worry about unexpected load and of course, security. The customer care call center is very important to me. As a result of these things, I’m thinking about separating the single FreePBX installation in to two.

Does this plan make sense? Is it commonly used? If you walked in to my company as a consultant, would you wonder what I was thinking? :slight_smile:

What is the best way to handle transfers from the customer care call center to the rest of the staff? In other words, if someone calls my toll free line looking for “Henry”, is the “best way” to handle this to ask the caller to dial my “office” number or transfer the caller and take up the two channels, plus bandwidth required?

Have you ever done this? Do you have any tips or tricks to share?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

2

Its not clear but it sounds like you have two sites which are some distance apart. I would always suggest it is best not to ask customers to re-dial as this can result in lost business.

So what is the best way to link the two sites?

Have you considered VPN, this way you can link the two servers through an “internal” IP address and create extentions with different prefixes eg. 61xx for Customer Care Site and 62xx for Office site. Transfering calls then become a matter of a outbound rule for numbers starting 62xx to use your new internal trunk.

I have tried this myself and had some success.

3

Or setup an IAX trunk between the two systems so you can transfer calls.