Who's hosting FreePBX for clients?

General
1

It’s always been my assumption (we all know what that leads to…) that most of the regulars here (and at FreePBX Community forum) are either on the corporate side (Sangoma or ClearlyIP employees) or run their own shop hosting/managing FreePBX for their own clients.

My background was corporate IT in both large companies and small startups, I dealt with phone systems because I had to, not so much because I wanted to (seems to be common in the IT world). I eventually left the corporate life for various reasons and started my own small MSP and Custom Integrations business (More residential tech, home automation, lighting, AV etc).

When I was in corporate I had a habbit of working very hard at being lazy… I basicly would spend two weeks coding a way to automate that one task that took me 1 hour a day to get it down to 1 minute a day… Eventually I had everything so that I was basically just doing preventative maintenance and reading reports and done by 9am every day. I was bored out of my mind and had the anxiety of needing to “look busy” to the higher ups on me all day.

When I went out on my own full time I was a one man show so that history of making my life boring paid off and I build my business like that. I only took customers that would allow me to clean up what they had and then maintain it so that I had less fires to put out. This worke well and still does, we’re proactive, not reactive like many MSP seem to be.

I got dragged into the PBX world because a customer had a voip system that wasn’t working and had been down for two days with neither vendor (PBX or Carrier) taking resposibility for the issue. They called me out of despiration and I agreed to “have a look.”

I found the issue (forget what it was now) contaced the vendor responsible, explained and they just flat out refused to do anything about it. I told the client to give me a day or so and I’d find a better solution. The next day I had FreePBX setup with some soft phones, and account with VoIP innovations and had Digium desk phones on order. Charged them a small fee monthly to manage the whole thing and the rest as they say is history.

Since then we’ve got about 60 PBX clients, some big, some small, we now use ClearlyIP as our carrier (because they’re awesome) and for the deskphone/softphone product and I’ve continued to automate my work away.

We host our PBX’s on cloud VM’s. Keep them locked down to only specific public IP’s, generally discorage the end customer from playing with them (which 99% are totally fine with). Touch each system at least once a week for PM and have written a few custom tools to monitor/alert on any system issues so that we generally know before our customers do that there’s an issue.

We tried using Zabbix for a while but it was a square peg in a round hole, too cumbersome and didn’t ever give me what I actually wanted/needed.

I’ve also developed a web based queue management tool for my end customers that gave them business inteligence they needed to manage employees and see real time call volumes (The QXact tool never really fit the need either).

So long story short I’ve gotten to the point where I belive there’s market out there for me to scale this and in thinking along those lines I started wondering what are other people/MSP’s doing? How are they doing it and am I on the right track here? Would the tools I’ve built be of value to anyone else?

So, if you’re read this far, for anyone on here doing the same/similar thing, what’s your story? How are you doing things? what’s your experience with customers: both pain points and successes?

2

We do the same. I have over 60 clients. Each of them have their own VPS through Vultr. We rebranded FreePBX and resell it as our solution. Works great. I have WindTerm setup so I have SSH access to every PBX and once a week i send a few commands to each system. We make changes for the clients included in the cost. It works well

3

What are you using to “send commands?”

We currently use ansible.

What are you using as a monitoring tool?

4

I use WindTerm to SSH into them and send commands from that. We don’t currently monitor them all like that though I will probably end up using Zabbix

5

So currently you just wait for the client to call you when they have an issue?

6

We utilize Edgeview. While we dont utilize anything to monitor the PBX, it monitors the connections to the site, to the pbx.

7

I know this is old, but currently I use zabbix with a custom command on the pbx to check total number of asterisk contacts. If contacts drop below 50% of the last 24hour’s average, I get an alert.

8

We could never get zabbix to work exactly the way we wanted. I’ve ended up building my own web based monitoring site. I’ve still got a list of enhancements I want to add but it’s working so well right now that they’ve slipped on my priority list.

9

Circling back to this. @Ashcor and @jlizzotte how’s this coming along? Particularly around FCC and other regulatory requirements? At 60+ businesses, how do you both balance switching amongst multiple VMs? Do either of you have this exclusively exposed to customers over a VPN tunnel only? Setup Carrier connections on each PBX?

Would either of you prefer a single-pane-of-glass to manage all of these separate PBXs?

10

I actually wrote a PBX monitoring app that monitors all my clients networks, pbx, VMS so actually works out pretty well. I pretty much already have a single pane of glass to manage everything. And we pair each phone system up with its own separate carrier so we aren’t the carrier of record so we don’t have to worry about filing form 499. We just have the other requirements of the e911 stuff.

11

SP each customer brings their own carrier?

12

We only manage the PBX and use ClearlyIP (14IP) for the carrier of record and they bill the client direclty so no FCC issues.

We already have a “single pane of glass” system we wrote that monitors and manages our clients PBX’s.

13

Basically the same, we use Siptrunk as the carrier. We just host them and manage their systems.

14

The amount of VMs is inconsequential to the FCC since that has nothing to do with the FCC. You could have 60+ VMs or 1 single system with all 60+ customers are on, it’s about how you bill for the voice services. Not being the carrier of record and not selling voice services means you don’t have to do anything with the FCC. Being a carrier of record and selling voice services directly has everything to do with the FCC.

15

Thanks for the response. That question was more around being the carrier of record than the number of VMs. Thanks for pointing me to the right phrase

16

@Ashcor and @jlizzotte thank you both for your responses. Non-US here with experience supporting multiple instances of FreePBX as an L1/L2 tech support. Looking to go all in,.providing hosted PBX and needed to be sure how that would go. I plan to set up a US LLC but telecom attorney I’m speaking with keeps hammering at GCC despite me repeatedly mentioning that I will only be providing the PBX software and possible customers would be billed directly by carrier.

Prodding a bit, do you straight up mention to your prospects that they’d be receiving two bills, one from the carrier and one from you?

17

In all the quotes I have seen from vendors like this, they quote it and then indicate that voice charges are separate and billed by someone else. And yes, it doesn’t matter what others do, you should indicate this to stop any confusion and/or frustration from the customer

18

I absolutely tell my customers that there will be two separate costs. One bill for us, and the other cost through their actual Telecom provider is a debit card on file. Morally I couldn’t sleep with myself if I did this whole big thing and then sprung on the fact that there is an additional cost that they didn’t already approve. But everyone fully knows because we need to get them set up on billing for the provider for the port and the initial order.

19

Got it. Thank you. I couldn’t sleep myself springing up a new bill on prospects.

20

If you have no plans to sell actual telecom service and just do VM hosting, why are you talking to a telecom lawyer?!