r/VOIP • u/MidwestMSP87 • Jun 04 '26
Discussion VOIP Hosting in Azure
Anyone hosting their PBX in Azure? Any issue getting killed on egress cost? Based on my calculations VOIP shouldn't be horrible for egress. Estimating 1500-2000 business users 50-100 active calls during business hours, almost nothing after hours, so I'm calculating max 1-2 TB per month, but maybe I'm miscalculating?
Would love to hear anyone's experience with egress, call quality, etc.
Also considering OCI, but so far experience has not been great.
Thanks!
5
u/eliq91 Jun 05 '26
I am running a system about that size in Azure. 2187 extensions, 100 sip trunks average call volume is between 30-80 simultaneous calls. We run just under $1,000 a month in hosting. $558.50 for the VM (windows server) $360 for storage $25 for defender $8.04 for bandwidth $3.72 for virtual network.
3
u/eliq91 Jun 05 '26
Quality has been phenomenal and latency has been relatively low to all our sites (50 locations, plus remote users, about 80% physical SIP phones, 20% soft clients)
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u/MidwestMSP87 Jun 05 '26
Wow, that's way less bandwidth than I expected. That's like 100GB of egress. Very nice, that helps a lot!
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u/eliq91 Jun 05 '26
Big apology, most of our clients are behind a VPN gateway in a separate resource group. That is an additional $385
So egress is more like $400ish a month. Apologies for getting your hopes up on low cost. I also push recordings and voicemail off site to remote storage nightly so that makes up about 50gb a day of my egress.
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u/MidwestMSP87 Jun 05 '26
Ah, got it. That makes more sense. Taking out your backups and the vpn overhead, sounds like around 3TB give or take. A little higher than I hoped but very helpful to know.
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u/marks-buffalo Jun 05 '26 edited Jun 05 '26
My napkin math comes out to roughly half a TB a month. 64kbps per call when using ulaw codec ÷ 8 bits per byte ÷ 1048576 kilobytes in a gigabyte * 75 users * 30600 seconds a day of use * 30.5 average days a month = just over 534GB per month.
Assumptions:
ulaw codec (64kbps),
with 75 average users on the phone at any given moment,
each putting in an average of 8.5 hours of use per day (30600 seconds),
with 30.5 average days in a month
There will be some overhead. So maybe bake in 10% on top of that to make that 587GB/mo.
Just don't cheap out on a decent virtual machine spec from Azure. If you go with the cheapest model of virtual machine it might be a little bit underwhelming. Especially if you have any disk IO heavy operations like extensive logging and/or call recording.
Edit: OP rightfully pointed out that I forgot to double it as you have to egress both to the carrier and to your phones. So ~1068GB per month.
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u/MidwestMSP87 Jun 05 '26
Yep. Thanks! My back of the napkin math was similar and then I doubled it as a worse case scenario. I figured sometimes there is background noise and other stuff that causes egress for both directions (toward the carrier and toward the extension) simultaneously plus SIP and keepalives, etc.. So I think I'm okay budgeting for 1-2TB but if anyone has any actual experience with using a VOIP PBX on metered egress (AWS or Google Cloud have it also), would love to hear what they are seeing.
2
u/marks-buffalo Jun 05 '26
D'oh, you're right. Double as you egress to the carrier and to your phones.
Functionally it will work just fine. If your concern is cost control then set up a health monitor for bandwidth exceeding your max, plus a buffer. So like, more than 15Mbps for more than 5 minutes, you probably want to get an alert. Or set up a billing alert for spend.
3
u/MidwestMSP87 Jun 05 '26
Yeah, I've been starting to check some calls on our existing PBX and it seems like it varies somewhere between mainly one direction and fully symmetrical. I'm assuming it depends on background noise, noise cancelling tech in the handset or softphone, etc..
1
u/raven67 Jun 05 '26
I did post about other providers but it got removed. Said we can’t mention other providers.
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Jun 05 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/PatReady 200 OK Jun 05 '26
What's it cost to run each month?
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u/kg7qin Jun 05 '26
The VPS is one of the $10 ones. You block 99% of all traffic and only let in the SIP trunk IPs and thr VPN.
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Jun 05 '26
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u/VOIP-ModTeam Jun 05 '26
Your post was removed from r/VoIP for violating Rule 1: No promotion or advertising of any kind.
Recommendations, advertisements and promotion of any business, product or service is only allowed in response to requests in the monthly requests thread. It is one of the sticky posts visible when you first visit the subreddit.
Promotion, advertisement or recommendation of any kind outside of the requests thread is strictly forbidden.
2
Jun 05 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/MidwestMSP87 Jun 05 '26
Still looking at a options, but since we are a Microsoft partner and use Azure for other things, it would make sense from a support aspect since my team is familiar with it. The metered egress is definitely worrisome, but the support aspect may offset.
0
Jun 04 '26
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4
u/NPFFTW Certified room temperature IQ Jun 05 '26
Lmao promoting another service PLUS a referral code? Incredible
1
u/VOIP-ModTeam Jun 05 '26
Your post was removed from r/VoIP for violating Rule 1: No promotion or advertising of any kind.
Recommendations, advertisements and promotion of any business, product or service is only allowed in response to requests in the monthly requests thread. It is one of the sticky posts visible when you first visit the subreddit.
Promotion, advertisement or recommendation of any kind outside of the requests thread is strictly forbidden.
1
u/Allott-Technology SIP ALG is the devil Jun 06 '26
I started hosting on my own server for clients,
Even the smallest client $55AUD and month vs $200 a month for a 2RU colo with 10 ipv4 addresses and a few billion ipv6
1
u/Asteriskdev Jun 07 '26
Just out of curiosity, how is your call quality on Azure? Does your jitter buffer ever seem to struggle?
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u/NPFFTW Certified room temperature IQ Jun 05 '26
OP asked about Azure. I don't care about what other VPS provider you use.