Pure SIP Phone System vs Hosted Phone System

If you are looking into getting a hosted phone system from a provider the most important thing, is that you may want to ask the provider whether or not the phone number they give you can be ported.  Ask yourself, is your business phone number important?  Be careful, as with hosted phone system, your phone numbers aren't really yours.  You are only renting them from your provider.  If you choose to switch provider, it can be a problem.  Look at it like this, would you sign a contract with any service provider for the rest of your life? 

Hosted phone system can be cost effective in the short term, but it may not be in the long term.  Let's say for example, you are a small business with 4 employees that needed 4 phones.  Let's say you are paying $50.00 per seats.  This may be be not much now, but let's say business started booming and you grow to 50 employees.  Now, you will be paying $2500 a month for just the phones.  You will most likely need to increase your bandwidth accordingly for the amount of phones and data traffic that your business require.  Remember, the phone system is hosted elsewhere, so it will utilize more bandwidth than a phone system on site, such as our Allworx VOIP Phone System.

Another thing, with hosted solutions, you are stuck with one carrier.  With Pure Phone System solutions, you can have 2 different carrier, which can be much more flexible when it comes to disaster recovery and or redundant.  You are probably saying, you do not need that much more features now, you may want to think again.  20 years ago, we never thought we would ever needed more storange than a floppy hard drive.  We always wonder why would someone pay for a dsl connection.  We never thought we needed our own personal computers.  Time change, technology change, business will always change.  Are you flexible enough so that you can adapt to the changing enviroment?