My recent experience with on premises vs cloud hosting

[iasm3j59s]

Oh what a wonderful couple of days I've had relearning the vagaries of PBX for small business! Here's some notes and observations in the hope that they may at least amuse those of you who have been through similar, and perhaps inform others tempted by this path.

Summary: cloud-hosted PBX is the way to go. I took a detour back into on-premises hosting with a FXO line in an attempt to simplify things and … it didn't work out.

Thanks: First, many thanks to @wardmundy and the many people who keep this alive, as well as those on this forum who helped out. I installed Trixbox and Asterisk@Home many years ago, helped a few friends install PIAF and while most have retired those systems, I still get called back for two friends who still have PBX needs and can't stomach the $20/per extension that still seems to be the going price for a "commercial" solution (is the "free forever" 3COM solution real?)

Background; Three years ago I did my first cloud install on vultr with the then available Incredible PBX module for a non-profit with ~25 extensions and two physical locations. This went remarkably smoothly and continues to operate well to this day. They were also the first install I'd done with voicemail transcribed in email, and that has proved to be terribly popular, even as most of them increasingly use their cell phones with no PBX association.

So, when a former neighbour had to update their 4 phone office PBX in a hurry after their physical 15yo pfsense router failed, making their what had become a VM on-premises PBX unusable (due to a multiple separated subnet for QoS) without a bunch of hassle (especially being 1000miles away), I reached for the cloud!

Two months later I learn that it has been a mess. Choppy voice calls, sometimes one way audio, missing ring tones sometimes. More here. None of these had been problems with the much larger non-profit setup, so … hmmm. What to do?!

Moving On Premises: The office has AT&T's weird ADSL internet using an Arris BGW210 with a bundled phone line coming out the back of the modem. For years, I've had that line auto-forward to the voip system. In theory there has been an "emergency" phone plugged in that can be used if necessary (though in practice that phone keeps getting unplugged and put in a drawer). Keeping this main number with AT&T was my safety against porting to a voip company that disappears or similar, as well as fallback in case of problems.

So, I thought, why not go back on premises with a new little box and ATA and start using that line "for real" and voip for excess capacity. They usually don't have more than a single call active, so in one stroke, this would remove the internet from everything (albiet still with the local LAN, and ignoring that the AT&T line was now voip itself rather than a physical line back to an exchange).

Apart from a digression due to a phantom DHCP server (per another thread I started elsewhere), this went fairly smoothly. Things I learned:

• Be thoughtful about the original install. I was remote and used a Tailscale connection to kick off the installation. In hindsight, I should have screenshared to a local PC and then done ssh from there. This would have allowed the installation firewall magic to work more cleanly. More here.
• Due to my lack of recent experience, FreePBX backup/restore didn't work too well between the 2024 and 2025 versions of Incredible PBX. I missed that a few critical modules (parking, time conditions) were not part of the base install (and/or didn't install properly?), so I had some re-work to do to transfer from the cloud service to the new on-premises box. (This went much more smoothly when I ultimately duplicated the cloud service)

But mostly what I learned was a big reminder of how bad it is dealing with actual physical phone lines and ATAs. I used the Grandstream HT813 which configured "well enough" if you squint and ignore the Asterisk log warnings for a bit. I had in and outbound calls going pretty quickly. But then I found:

• you need to wait 2 rings on the ATA to get callerid before "answering" the call and handing it off to the PBX
• weirdness with a 20sec ringall transitioning to an IVR menu but the announcement playback would be mostly finished on handoff. This only happened with the ATA, not when calling from voip.

And then I got into configuring the external voip side of things. I was using Flowroute because that had worked well for me 3 years ago (and I did eventually port the non-profit DIDs to it and that has been smooth). This was a crash course in port forwarding and NAT settings and the dreaded one way audio and DTMF tones not being recognised in the IVR. I got to the point that Flowroute would register and calls could be answered, but then had to go into the office to confirm audio after suspicions that it wasn't working. …

At this point I bailed on on-premises. Maybe I was super close, but everything was harder. And it was such a contrast with cloud configuration.

So, after 6+ hours of working on the on-premises solution, I spun up another VULTR instance, this time taking great care to copy the one I had set up 3 years ago. I realised I had done "High Performance" 2 months ago but the 3yo version was "High Frequency", so I did that instead. In an hour I had provisioned, installed and copied the backup and had the system running. Weirdly, I had to run the install twice, after it finished the first time and Asterisk wasn't running and I'd seen SQL errors go by. But after the 2nd time everything went green and I was able to restore from backups (I did go back to the 2024 version instead of 2025).

A quick trip to the office this morning confirmed that everything seems to be working ok. Of course the real test will be the day to day use. Hopefully there will be no recurrance of choppy audio, one way audio, missing ring progress tones. At least the IVR doesn't sound choppy anymore, which was a regular occurance on the prior VULTR instance.

Anyhow, I hope this a fun read. Happy to answer any questions arising.