Hosted vs Onsite – Which is the right VoIP service for your business? - Complete IT

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Hosted vs Onsite – Which is the right VoIP service for your business?

by | Apr 20, 2016 | Archived Articles

When deploying VoIP telephony, your business has two choices, to use an onsite PBX switchboard or a hosted equivalent. So which is right for you?

Why choose onsite VoIP?

As with all self-managed systems, onsite VoIP relies on specialist hardware – the PBX switchboard. This device routes incoming and outgoing calls, ensuring they are directed correctly.

And like all IT hardware, an onsite PBX represents a capital investment that comes from your budget and which needs to be accounted for over the lifetime of the unit. There is also the issue of support, maintenance and capacity upgrades that add to the overall cost of maintaining the system. If you need to add more extensions, you need to pay for the system to be upgraded; if demand for capacity drops, your business is left with costly, redundant capacity.

Why choose hosted VoIP?

Hosted VoIP is virtually identical in operation to a traditional PBX, but rather than using onsite hardware, calls are routed via Cloud-based platform. Instead of capital investment, your business subscribes on a per-extension basis, helping to reduce wasted spend. By choosing a per-extension billing method, your business can add and remove capacity whenever required, ensuring you only ever pay for what you use.

Hosted VoIP is also ideal for supporting your mobile workforce. Using smartphone apps, your employees can be connected to the company switchboard, accepting internal and external calls as if they were sat at their desk in the office. All without costly call forwarding to mobile phones.

Like other Cloud services, support, maintenance, and software upgrades are all part of the standard subscription fee, further helping to keep your telecoms costs low. All without the headache of situating and running onsite hardware.

Making your mind up

Ultimately the choice between hosted or onsite will come down to your specific business needs. In almost every case, however, hosted VoIP will be a good fit. And being that hosted VoIP is a subscription-based service, your business can always test drive the concept, moving towards an onsite solution in the unlikely event you do encounter problems or limitations.

For more help and advice on choosing a VoIP system for your business, or for more details about how VoIP can reduce your phone bills, please get in touch.