Over the past 3 years I’ve setup a hosted solution for a business that has saved them over $5000 per year on their telephone bill.

If you have ever dealt with porting numbers or switching telephone services it is a complete nightmare. However, you can do this all yourself and take control and save a TON of money in the process. Need to move from this solution? Install and register your numbers on something else in minutes, NOT days or even weeks in some instances.

The best part is you will own your numbers directly and have NO contracts that some sneaky companies that lock you in to their services for years at a time.

The Solution

There are many solutions that can be self hosted where you register a telephony trunk, but the easiest I’ve found is 3CX. It has a variety of plans from free to under 10 users to a good small business setup for around 20 users, but the best part is you pay for the SERVER… NOT the user accounts.

Installation

I’ve done videos on 3cx installation. Here are links to both self-hosted and using the hosted plans above. For a small business I’d recommend the SMB Plan above.

3CX Hosted Installation Video: https://youtu.be/M7dXvFDhoaI 3CX Self-Hosted Installation Video: https://youtu.be/P6CS5_CHy8s

Features

Call Forwarding

To setup Call forwarding I’d recommend adding a mobile number in User Web Client -> Settings

After that is setup, Specify My Mobile in different modes (DND, Away, Etc.). You can also specify different forwards for internal and external calls.

Office/Holiday Hours

In the System configuration panel, You can specify Office Hours and Holiday Messages.

Mobile Application

The mobile app for android and iOS is amazing. Has a ton of functionality and can substitute as an extension.

Live Chat

They also have live chat code that is really easy to add to any website. Only two lines of code and you can setup an entire call center. Here is the video I did on that.

Walkthrough Video