Hi everyone
I'm looking to move our small business away from a conventional analogue PBX phone system to an IP PBX. We've got an office move coming up and our telephone system installer quoted £800 to move our existing system, the same old phone system we've had for 17 years (Meridian Norstar). I'd rather spend that on new handsets, improved functionality (work from home) and cheaper call costs/line rentals.
Found a company called voipfone.co.uk who seem to be decent, industry award winners and good reviews. Quality of service seems perfect in my testing with softphones so far. But they don't quite offer the configuration that I'm specifically looking for from our hosted PBX.
I realise that virtualising Asterisk or any IP PBX isn't a great idea, but generally I thought that was down to driver support and the low-latency needed for hardware telephone adaptors.
I'll be looking to build a small SIP server (15 user PBX) so no hardware adaptors needed.
Receiving calls from numbers hosted on an account with voipfone.co.uk
And forwarding the calls to extensions located in our office (9 users) and various home locations (6 users, 2 of those in the US).
Rather than going the OpenVZ route and building stuff from source, I think the easiest way would be to find someone who offers VMWare or Xen HVM hosting with a CPU/memory/HDD quota.
Then I could load up whatever ISO image I wanted, eg: trixbox or AsteriskNow.
I've used OpenVZ in the past and we have a few US-based VPS accounts for websites and e-mail relays. Kernel-based paravirtualisation is great for high-density hosting.
But for something like this I'd prefer full-scale virt... Xen HVM or VMWare
I looked at dedicated and colo but that does seem like overkill for a 15 user SIP server. Colo I reckon I could find for £45 p/m, so any virtualisation solutions costing more than that just isn't worth it for this project.
If I could get something around £20-£30 p/m area then I'd be seriously interested.
Bandwidth, I can't imagine a 15 user PBX requires much.
Memory and CPU would be the main requirements, however having never configured an IP PBX before I've no idea what would be needed for a 15 user PBX.
Anyone out there know any Xen HVM hosts I should have a look at?
Or even VMWare, but from digging around it seems VMware's difficult to find and prohibitively expensive.
Be great if there was a VoIP-specific trixbox VDS host or something.
Pretty sure I'll go with voipfone.co.uk though to actually terminate our telephone numbers and forward the calls using SIP to our IP PBX.
I'd like the provider to be pretty permanent. I don't want a company who's going to disappear in a years time, leaving me to find a new PBX host. Although the advantage of a hosted PBX is that it should be easy to move if needed.
Cheers, B
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