Hosted Asterisk or Trixbox Provider?

I'm looking for a hosted Asterisk, TrixBox, SwitchVox, or PBXtra provider. I don't have the means to purchase the equipment as I run a two-man business. I know Aretta offers these services, but I haven't heard much about them. Anyone ever use Aretta communications? If you have any other suggestions, I'd love to hear those as well.

Vitelity.net now offers dedicated Asterisk solutions. It's a bet pricy. You should look at getting a good VPS, and installing Asterisk on it.

I guess you're looking for US based? If you are then SynapseGlobal do them.





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Have you consider looking in to Virtual PBX? You can have all features that you need and no head each of managing it?





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Quote:



Originally Posted by ydonchenko


Have you consider looking in to Virtual PBX? You can have all features that you need and no head each of managing it?


I'm not too familiar with Virtual PBX. What is the technology behind it?
-mike





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Try http://lylix.net/
roberto





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Why not a vps?





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Asterisk does not perform well in vps under even moderate load due to timing issues. I am sure it can be done but it is not done now.

Virtual PBX is a generic term for hosted PBX that each user (company) can set up a separate company or call plan with overlapping extensions from other users. In asterisk this is managed with contexts.

I have used Lylix in the past, but had a few jitter issues due to a provider in my area. I have since switched to Elastix running on a VPS at Linode.com and couldn't be happier. The great thing about Linode is that you can chose from 3 (I think it is 3) datacenters, so you can pick one that is closest to your location.
For VoIP service, I use Vitelity.
Lata!





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Pinellas Hosting offers a hosted PBX solution (http://www.pinellashosting.com). I know that if a VPS is tuned properly, you can run VoIP, moderately, on the system.





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http://www.sysadminman.net/ does voip vps based in the UK

We've been looking at Aretta too. We like their pricing and we like the control they offer, but we're a little bit gunshy because we can't find a lot of positive feedback on them. Anyone had any experience with them?

For Trixbox hosting, we've been using Lylix.net for over two years now with approx. 20 - 30 extensions from two different office locations. All in all, I can recommend them.

For call origination and termination providers, we use a mix of Voicepulse, Vitelity and Voipstreet.

In general, we've had more problems with the configuration of our Polycoms SIP 500/1 than with either the hosting or long distance service providers.

try exordiumnetworks.net they provide to go hosted solutions

How would you deal with NAT Traversal with Asterisk without SBC?

A lot of SIP handsets are NAT aware now and will keep firewall ports open by sending keep-alives. Asterisk is also NAT aware and can use the incoming IP of the handset rather than the actual IP address of the handset. Asterisk also has to stay in the media path rather than being able to pass it off to the endpoints.

SIP was definitely not designed to work with NAT though and certain combinations of handsets/firewalls can be a pain to get working.

You could always find something IAX2 based.

A simple Xen VPS and asterisk works wonders.

When running an asterix server or the like - how much does it generally cost to get #'s from like verizon or something?

When running an asterix server or the like - how much does it generally cost to get #'s from like verizon or something?

That would probably be expensive. Check out http://www.vitelity.net/

They have $1mo did's and low per minute rates.

It depends where you want the numbers and how many you want. Check out somewhere like callwithus (http://www.callwithus.com/) or callcentric (http://www.callcentric.com/) to get a rough idea for one off numbers.

Thanks for that -- A company I work for is potentially looking at switching over to VOIP and we currently have 12 lines. I have been trying to price out this and that was one thing I wasn't sure where to get a good quote from (besides calling a telco)

take a look at www.aretta.com they doing asterisk and trixbox hosting... does not know how they service is but the people who runs a company very honest people witch is hard to find in telecom in now days.

you can always buy an Atom box. I've done this for a few clients

Lylix.net is the best option , I have been with them almost two years ,and there support is second to none.

They are highly skilled in Asterisk.

We are running asterisk in an HVM XEN server, with 99.96% zaptel accuracy. Timing is not an issue at all, and using flowroute as an SIP trunking service, my call quality is as good as a land line.

Hey guys, I just finished moving a company over to aretta.com. They've been great to work with, I've been very very satisified with the service.

A couple notes on things I did:
1) Setup a second ISP and configured ASA to send all traffic out via the second ISP. In addition we setup failover and QOS rules.
2) Switched to a POE router to minimize installation AND to provide continunity if there was a power outage (UPS backup for the POE switch and ASA, etc)
3) Purchased refurbed Polycom IP 430 phones from metrolinedirect.com. Overall I was happy with the phones and their service
4) Setup my own provisoning server for the phones

That's the big pieces. So far so good and we'll be saving a ton of money. If you would like to know more just let me know.

Regards,
Jerret

If you are serious about your service, i suggest go for dedicated server, as you can not get best quality from asterisk on VPS. So go for your own dedicated server, or some providers who are providing Asterisk on dedicated servers.

I gown through most of above Asterisk providers, finally i can suggest Activaspace.com/solutions.php for their unmatched price for dedicated server and Free A2Billing Setup.

Before buy any hosted asterisk, please ensure following things:

# are they providing enough data transfer?
# are they providing enough disk space?
# are they providing 24*7 support?
# are they providing bandwidth?
# Check for branded hardware and replacement guarantee
# Check for minimum downtime
# and finally cost effective

If you are serious about your service, i suggest go for dedicated server, as you can not get best quality from asterisk on VPS. So go for your own dedicated server, or some providers who are providing Asterisk on dedicated servers.

I gown through most of above Asterisk providers, finally i can suggest Activaspace.com/solutions.php for their unmatched price for dedicated server and Free A2Billing Setup.

Before buy any hosted asterisk, please ensure following things:

# are they providing enough data transfer?
# are they providing enough disk space?
# are they providing 24*7 support?
# are they providing bandwidth?
# Check for branded hardware and replacement guarantee
# Check for minimum downtime
# and finally cost effective

A properly setup VPS works fine, I'm not sure why people think you need a dedicated server. Sure, if you have a thousand concurrent calls you may need to rethink your deployment and hardware requirements. I know Aretta spent quite a bit of time working on their VPS solution, from what I gather you may have to make quite a few tweaks to get acceptable performance. This just means you need to do some research on a provider before going down this path.

The provider I mentioned above allocates resources based on the PBX plan you purchase, so a four concurrent call PBX has less resources than an eight concurrent call PBX.

In addition, bandwidth and disk space is calculated for you and is included as part of the package. When you go this route you're buying a service, not a server per say. You shouldn't have to worry about drives going bad, how much resources your consuming, etc. You're renting a PBX and it better work, if it doesn't then the provider needs to fix it.

Here's some other goodies that I get (and I think other providers should follow suit):

1) They offer a failover-VPS server (redundancy) for a nominal fee
2) PBX software is upgraded regularly. In fact, I can't even modify the core asterisk/freepbx installation as it's running off a special mount to one of their servers.
3) I filled out a doc and they setup the PBX, including extensions, IVR, conference lines, music on hold, etc.
4) They have a nice UI where I can easily provision new DIDs, set them on trunk A, B, etc. and even set up failover phone numbers in the event the PBX/network goes down.

It all depends on what you want but we're extremely satisfied with the new system and we're saving over $500 a month vs our old provider.

Regards,
Jerret

I somehow agree with Jerret in one aspect, that unless you will be running above 100 conc. calls which usually means usually between 600-1000 subscribers using 1:10 to 1:6(which is very generous btw in telecom) then you can really manage well using VPS or even cloud :).

BUT ( there is always a but)

the only obvious advantage of dedicated would be the access to kernel resources... which some virtual pbx providers (VPS) offer already as it enables them to install DAHDI drivers (needed for good timing source).

Conlclusion is if you are welling to pay 50$ /month for a VPS asterisk which usually costs them less than 10-15$ thats fine , if you will be installing your own system..... freepbx/a2b/aterisk etc then your best bet would be Dedicated...


Oh and BTW.. I'D STRONGLY , VERY STRONGLY ADVICE AGAINST USING SYNAPSEGLOBAL @ ANY COST... I'M EXISTING CUSTOMER AND CANT WAIT TILL MY MONTH PAYMENT IS UP TO MIGRATE .

Cheers
Eden

i recommend you look into the voxalot service or even ipkall. check them out. Ipkall is great for getting you own free phone number to route to your asterisk or pbx system.

<<signatures to be set up in your profile>>

There are a couple ways to do this,

Ideally, the best way, would be to get a VPS and install Asterisk/FreePBX yourself. You can manage it in a few hours and it'll run great. Be aware that a lot of there are a lot VPS providers out there that provide horrible service. Linode, Amazon EC2, GoGrid, and finally BurstNET (we like them a lot), are all good places to start looking

VoIP is really sensitive to Quality of Service and stuff like that. If somebody on your network is running Bittorrent it's gonna kill your VoIP. Network management is crucial. If you can grab dedicated bandwidth somewhere that would be golden.

Anyhow, running your own server is going to give you the most control. Aretta forces you to use their minutes, DIDs, etc.. I have heard they run a pretty reliable service so it's not too bad.

Administrating a voip server for security and reliability is a full time job. I and another tech did it at my old job, and we had constant reliability problems (do to crappy network hardware), and generally not investing enough in the project to start with. Management though the project would be half of one salary in maintenance, it ended up being one and half, and that doesn't count the lost productivity from losing phones randomly. If you want to go voip, even hosted voip, start with making sure you have a high quality router (like a cisco), not a consumer piece of crap, make sure your switches and wires are also decent quality and aren't going to crap out under higher load. If you don't have a decent IT infrastructure already, that prevents people on your internet connection from doing stuff like running bit-torrent, don't do voip. At the company I work for now, the boss realizes phones are critical for getting work done, and invested in cisco routers and phones, reliable switches, and a great hosted voip company, and we've never had a problem with voip.

If you're not willing to invest in doing voip properly, and you goal is have phones that work reliably, and not study networking (I learned a lot about networking troubleshooting voip, which was the only good thing about that system), get a land line, or use skype or something.