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My company currently runs a Trixbox Pro server locally. We're getting sick of the licensing fees and terrible community support and are considering migrating to something like FreePBX. I see that there are plenty of folks out there who are running this from a VPS rather than a local server -- and I wanted to see what Pros and Cons you guys can think of.

Clearly the big one is that you can't connect POTS lines and such, but this doesn't matter to us since we strictly use SIP.

Also, if we wanted to use a call recording solution (which if doing locally, typically requires an ethernet "tap" and a second server dedicated to recordings), I'm not sure how that would work.

Eric
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Your networking issues will increase exponentially. You'll have to troubleshoot issues with latency from various locations, you'll have worse packet jitter, etc. I've had nothing but heartache with SIP to remote sites/servers.

Driftpeasant
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Freeswitch is probably a better fit, and isn't based on Asterisk.

The biggest problem will probably be that the majority of VPS providers are utter shite.. Especially when things like uptime, and network availability are concerned.

There are other problems too, such as IO and network contention, which could mean that you'd drop calls or call quality, especially if other servers on the VPS host are getting DDOSed or hammered by IO intensive stuff.

I'd rent a dedicated server, that way you can at least be sure that you've not got other people's traffic and utilisation affecting your server.

The other thing that could cause issues is the extra lag induced by having the office phones connect over the WAN to the PBX, so the path looks like Internet - WAN - PBX - WAN - Office.

I'd put the PBX inside the office ideally, so you've got less hops.

Tom O'Connor
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