Has anyone used FluidServers.net?

Dashrender

@Dashrender said:

Rackspace offers Elastix for 25 concurrent lines for $15/month? Even if this doesn't include the cost of the SIP trunks - why is anyone running their own phone system?

Far bigger than that. DO for even less. $10 on DO I think.

Because people wear tin foil hats to work every day.

Is that a jab

scottalanmiller

@Dashrender lol, wasn't mean to be.

People fear hosting in general, even though it is often more secure and stable. It's just a curse of IT.

Dashrender

Considering these options - am I just crazy to consider hosting our PBX in the cloud?

I'm completely unwilling to pay $10-20/ext/month like some providers want, but I'd definitely be willing to look at other solutions closer to $1-3/ext/month providing my own endpoint equipment (including SIP trunks) for my 66 extensions (16 in one building, 50 in another)?

If you have the redundancy and reliability on site there is no reason to pay for some one else to host it when you could just spin up a new vm.

Dashrender

@scottalanmiller said:

@Dashrender lol, wasn't mean to be.

People fear hosting in general, even though it is often more secure and stable. It's just a curse of IT.

The stability is what I fear. The cost of going to a better protected internet connection, or trying to manage multiple ISPs is costly and at times difficult.

i.e. we currently pay $875/month for 10 Mb fiber connection with a 99.999 SLA - of course the SLA is only giving us some cash back if they drop below the SLA, and that doesn't really do me any good when I have 40 patients in the waiting room and I have to cancel because my internet connection went down so I can no longer access my EHR which is entirely online only.

So I can look to bringing in another ISP and different firewall/router equipment to fail over to in case one provider has an issue I can keep working from the other.

In writing this all things considered I can probably save myself a bundle, get two lower class ISPs (cable and DSL) from different providers.

Thoughts? - nevermind.. don't answer in this thread - I've started a new one.

2015-04-07 14:21:56 (951 KB/s) - ‘download’ saved [1342113792/1342113792]

[root@localhost ~]# mkdir /mnt/iso
[root@localhost ~]# mount -o loop Elastix-4.0.48-BETA1-x86_64-bin-12mar2014.iso /mnt/iso
mount: Elastix-4.0.48-BETA1-x86_64-bin-12mar2014.iso: failed to setup loop device: No such file or directory

@Dashrender said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@Dashrender lol, wasn't mean to be.

People fear hosting in general, even though it is often more secure and stable. It's just a curse of IT.

The stability is what I fear. The cost of going to a better protected internet connection, or trying to manage multiple ISPs is costly and at times difficult.

i.e. we currently pay $875/month for 10 Mb fiber connection with a 99.999 SLA - of course the SLA is only giving us some cash back if they drop below the SLA, and that doesn't really do me any good when I have 40 patients in the waiting room and I have to cancel because my internet connection went down so I can no longer access my EHR which is entirely online only.

So I can look to bringing in another ISP and different firewall/router equipment to fail over to in case one provider has an issue I can keep working from the other.

In writing this all things considered I can probably save myself a bundle, get two lower class ISPs (cable and DSL) from different providers.

Thoughts?

Business Grade connections are much better. I wouldn't consider a low end connection. It's not worth it. You get what you pay for in terms of connections. Fiber connections are generally far more reliable and have less latency than a Cable or DSL connection. It also it's a shared trunk in most cases with DSL/Cable.

@Hubtech File was named download and not the actual ISO name...

scottalanmiller

@thecreativeone91 said:

Business Grade connections are much better. I wouldn't consider a low end connection. It's not worth it. You get what you pay for in terms of connections. Fiber connections are generally far more reliable and have less latency than a Cable or DSL connection. It also it's a shared trunk in most cases with DSL/Cable.

I've seen the opposite. Business grade often has the bigger outages. The "you get what you pay for" thing isn't true in the real world. Business grade connections are mostly smoke and mirrors. They get businesses to overbuy because it sounds good. But the consumer fiber is cheaper for more. Same or lower latency, better uptime. I've never seen any business get a fiber line as good as consumer cable in the northeast even at $1,000 a month.

Do anything to avoid business connections. If it comes with an SLA, you are being screwed.

scottalanmiller

What I've seen the most from business grade connections are days or even weeks (and in a rare care over six months) of downtime. Business grade means, normally, that you are a lone customer with little value to the ISP. When you go down, they don't care. And having that business empathy explains just about everything. You have no leverage . You just don't matter.

Consumer lines when a line goes down, lots of people are down and pissed and talking about it. It's a real outage that impacts reputation and potentially legal liability. Business class lines are promoted because they, by and large, protect the ISPs from the big responsibilities.

@scottalanmiller said:

What I've seen the most from business grade connections are days or even weeks (and in a rare care over six months) of downtime.

I don't know what sketchy business you deal with but I've never had that happen. I've had consumer grade go down for multiple days. I've never had business fiber down past the SLAs (which is normally 1hr)

sometimes scott lives in his own little world of absolute truths.

scottalanmiller

@thecreativeone91 said:

@scottalanmiller said:

What I've seen the most from business grade connections are days or even weeks (and in a rare care over six months) of downtime.

I don't know what sketchy business you deal with but I've never had that happen. I've had consumer grade go down for multiple days. I've never had business fiber down past the SLAs (which is normally 1hr)

I've had it from tons of carriers. Fiber, T lines, you name it. Since there is an SLA, there is no hustle. I've had carriers decide it was cheaper to never fix a line and take the permanent SLA penalty than to fix the line leaving customers with no way to cancel their service but getting no service.

Remember, I've working in consulting for sixteen years so I have a pretty broad view of carriers across regions and types. Every line type can have big outages. But only SLA lines have that extra protection to keep the ISP from being seriously hurt by it.

scottalanmiller

@thecreativeone91 said:

I've never had business fiber down past the SLAs (which is normally 1hr)

I've had two fiber lines both down for over 72 hours.

I've had transatlantic lines fail because a trench pulled up a line in Egypt.

scottalanmiller

@thecreativeone91 said:

I don't know what sketchy business you deal with but I've never had that happen. I've had consumer grade go down for multiple days.

Likewise,what bad consumer grade carriers are you using?

@scottalanmiller said:

Remember, I've working in consulting for sixteen years

16 years ago the internet and ISP world was very different. It's not the same today.

scottalanmiller

@thecreativeone91 said:

@scottalanmiller said:

Remember, I've working in consulting for sixteen years

16 years ago the internet and ISP world was very different. It's not the same today.

Yes, but just because I have MORE experience doesn't make my current experience less useful. And experience with things like SLAs does not change over time. Legal protection and skillful marketing is always the same. That the Internet has changed doesn't imply that the legal tactics to swindle people have.

@scottalanmiller said:

@thecreativeone91 said:

I've never had business fiber down past the SLAs (which is normally 1hr)

I've had two fiber lines both down for over 72 hours.

I've had transatlantic lines fail because a trench pulled up a line in Egypt.

We aren't talking about international here. This is mostly related to the US. I'm sure other countries are quite different. You can't combine the statistics of both.

scottalanmiller

@thecreativeone91 said:

We aren't talking about international here. This is mostly related to the US. I'm sure other countries are quite different. You can't combine the statistics of both.

I'm not. But you are relying on implying that my experience is out of date (due to length and volume, not a gap in it) and not from the same country to try to discredit a lot of experience with a lot of carriers and customers of all sizes in the same country as you.

scottalanmiller

Bottom line is, SLAs, while sounding good, primarily are written by the vendors and are designed to cap their damages and liability while sounding like a great sales tool. Nothing sounds better than "we get an SLA", it actually sounds like they HAVE to do those things. But an SLA is actually a tool for the vendor to choose whether to deliver a service or pay the cost of not delivering it. It's that simple. An SLA is a legal vehicle to make it easy for them to quantify the exact cost of an outage's maximum and decide how to approach it.