“Hosted by 3CX”: Is the voip telephone system from the cloud a good deal?
3CX has been offering its own hosting for your VoIP telephone system since the end of 2020. With this offer, 3CX takes over the operation, maintenance and updating of their telephony platform of the same name. The special thing about it: there are no additional costs, as the hosting is included in the purchase price of a 3CX Pro or 3CX Enterprise license and no additional infrastructure service provider is required.
This offer, which is convincing at first glance, is not necessarily suitable for everyone. It has to be considered whether one can live with the restrictions of “Hosted by 3CX” and whether the advantages outweigh the above. This article is intended to help managing directors or IT managers make decisions and therefore describes this new type of offer from 3CX and the associated restrictions in detail.
What is “Hosted by 3CX”?
3CX has not become a data center operator and does not operate its own data centers. Instead, 3CX cooperates with Digital Ocean and uses their infrastructure for the telephone systems of “Hosted by 3CX”. 3CX takes care of the configuration of the network and firewall as well as regular maintenance. In addition, the operating system and the telephone system are updated automatically. Daily backups and constant monitoring complete the telephone system package.
There are no costs for hosting, as all services are included in the price of a Pro or Enterprise license. When it comes to support, a distinction must be made between issues relating to usage and problems with the platform. Telephony support is provided as usual by a 3CX partner such as datamate or you can book commercial business support through 3CX, which charges $ 75 per ticket. In this area, the support of “Hosted by 3CX” does not differ from a self-hosted platform.
A live chat is available for problems relating to the operation of the platform, which promises quick reactions and problem solving. Even if the Hosted by 3CX product page advertises an availability of 99.99% — which corresponds to a calculated maximum downtime of less than one hour per year — we cannot yet provide any empirical values for this value. It will only be possible to say in the future whether the 99.99% can really be adhered to in the end, but the SLA is not a guaranteed availability of the telephone system but only the normal SLAs of Digital Ocean with regard to the availability of the servers. On the other hand, 3CX is a reliable solution that has worked reliably for all of our customers for many years and versions.
Installation and migration in under 15 minutes
Another highlight of this offer is the simple installation of a new telephone system or the easy migration of an existing instance. 3CX advertises the installation with a maximum effort of 15 minutes, which is also applicable if you realize that after this time you have the administrative user interface of 3CX in front of you and the configuration of the SIP trunk, the users and the telephones or a session border controller are still necessary.
The migration is also very easy and can be started directly in the 3CX Customer Center. As soon as the migration has been initiated, 3CX creates a backup of the previous telephone system and transfers it to a new telephone system at Digital Ocean. Then it only takes a few minutes until the new telephone system can be reached under the previous URL.
In theory, all soft clients and telephones are automatically re-provisioned and you can continue calling seamlessly. In reality, small interventions such as the configuration adjustment of an existing session border controller or individual telephones and a certain downtime cannot be avoided.
What are the limitations of 3CX hosting?
Hosting by 3CX has a few drawbacks and limitations that are important to be aware of. The restrictions can be roughly divided into three categories with several sub-aspects.
1. Digital Ocean is the infrastructure provider
The main restriction is that as a customer you have no influence on the instances of Digital Ocean used. 3CX guarantees a German customer that the server used (Digital Ocean calls its servers with preinstalled software “Droplet”) is hosted by Digital Ocean in a German data center, but Digital Ocean remains an American provider.
In addition, the resources of the droplets used are fixed. You can neither individually set the hard disk size nor the number of CPU's or RAM. Individual needs or requirements cannot be met in this way.
Another limitation is the lack of access to the operating system or platform. Since the management is carried out entirely by 3CX, there is no SSH or other access other than web access.
Although “Hosted by 3CX” includes daily backups and regular save points, 3CX recommends its customers to make regular external backups. Additional costs for a corresponding backup can arise here.
2. Hosted by 3CX only works with a suitable SIP trunk
This limitation is not directly related to 3CX or the Digital Ocean infrastructure used. Nevertheless, you have to make it clear that this offer is a cloud solution and therefore only registration-based SIP trunking supported by 3CX can be used. I.e. SIP trunks that are tied to either an IP address, a special router, an address, or a country will not work.
easybell, the VoIP provider we typically recommend to German or European customers, works without problems in combination with “Hosted by 3CX”.
3. Reduced functions
Functionally, you have to accept a few restrictions with this hosting offer from 3CX. These can be found in the following list:
- A session border controller is essential for IP telephones in the office. This can be a virtual machine or a dedicated unit.
- The 3CX system parameters are not accessible.
- The Call Flow Designer cannot be used.
- Individual telephone templates cannot be used either.
- All voice recordings with the exception of Voicemail are only possible with an Enterprise license. With a local or self-hosted 3CX, however, voice recordings are already possible with a Pro license.
For whom is Hosted by 3CX suitable or not suitable?
The answer is usually easy to answer: Hosted by 3CX makes sense if none of the above restrictions are relevant. I.e. Companies that have no problem with Digital Ocean, who can handle the reduced functions and use a suitable SIP trunk, cannot go wrong with “Hosted by 3CX” from our point of view. As I said, we cannot yet provide any empirical values for the reliability of the Digital Ocean Droplet as the basis for a 3CX.
On the other hand, an American infrastructure provider like Digital Ocean could be a no-go for some customers. Be it due to internal requirements or the desire for SSH access or the individual need for more RAM, CPU or storage space for more voice recordings. E.g. use some of our current customers have SSH access to extract the voice recordings from the telephone system.
The limited functions will certainly keep one or the other customer from using Hosted by 3CX. However, each customer must decide this individually. The decision for or against Hosted by 3CX is fortunately not a decision for life and can be changed at any time.
Our offer to you
We see “Hosted by 3CX” as a useful addition to the typical local or self-hosted installations. For this reason, we have decided to put together a fixed price offer for the installation / migration and configuration of the telephone system hosted by 3CX. For a one-time fee of € 400, the experts from datamate, the platinum partner from Rhineland-Palatinate (Germany), take over the installation / migration and the subsequent configuration of the SIP trunk, users and telephones. Details can be found in the following installation offer.
Regardless of whether you opt for “Hosted by 3CX” or a self-hosted or local telephone system from 3CX, we at datamate offer the right support package. With Basis, Plus and Premium, we offer you planning security and clearly defined service packages at a fixed price. Regardless of the infrastructure used, everyone needs a reliable 3CX partner by their side. Contact us.
Originally published at https://www.datamate.org (in german language) on December 30, 2020.
