What is a hosted PBX?

Hosted systems are rented by the extension, with the provider handling the rest. Upgrades, backups, the server that used to sit in a cupboard and hum.

Setup changes shape completely. Adding a person is a line in a web portal rather than a visit from an engineer with a screwdriver.

The catch is that your phone system now depends on your internet connection. If the office link drops, so do the desk phones, which is why sensible setups forward to mobiles automatically when that happens.

Cost moves from a purchase to a subscription. Whether that is cheaper over five years depends on how often you would have replaced the hardware anyway.

Here's a hypothetical comparison, with round numbers you should replace with your own quotes. An eight-person accounting office is priced at $25 per user per month for a hosted system. That's $200 a month, or $12,000 over five years, with desk phones either rented in or bought once at around $90 each.

An on-site box is quoted at $4,500 installed, plus $600 a year for a maintenance contract, plus the lines themselves at $160 a month. Over five years that's $4,500, then $3,000, then $9,600, for a total of $17,100.

On those figures hosted wins by about $5,000. Change one assumption and it narrows fast. If the office already owns a working box with three years of life left, the $4,500 drops out. Now the two options land within a few hundred dollars of each other. The subscription is rarely the expensive choice, but it isn't automatically the cheap one either.

What happens to inbound calls when your office internet goes down? You want a failover number held on their side, and you want to set it yourself in the portal rather than by raising a ticket.

How do you port your numbers out if you leave, and is there a fee? A provider that makes leaving hard is telling you something about how it expects to keep customers.

Ask how much bandwidth each call needs. The usual answer is roughly 100 kbps in each direction, so eight simultaneous calls use under 1 Mbps. Your connection almost certainly has the capacity. Whether voice gets priority over a large upload is the real question, and that's a router setting on your side.

Find out the contract length, the notice period, and whether the per-user price is fixed for the term. Ask where you update each user's 911 address. Finally, ask whether call logs and recordings can be exported in bulk. That history belongs to your business, and you'll want it on the day you move.

GreetKeeper connects by forwarding, so it works the same whether your system is hosted or sitting on site.

You point a number, an extension or an after-hours rule at the assistant and leave everything else alone.

When your internet drops, carrier-level forwarding still runs, because it happens on the network rather than in your building.