Asterisk on a VPS
I get a lot of people asking me about running Asterisk on a VPS. It’s a great way to get started and experiment with Asterisk and find out what it can do.
If you’ve used something like Skype or Vonage before then you’ll have an idea what you can do with VOIP but running your own Asterisk server makes things so much more flexible.
If you combine Asterisk with FreePBX, a great web interface for configuring Asterisk, then you’ll have an extremely capable PBX. There are many plugin modules available for FreePBX which provide an easy way to setup advanced features such as voicemail, IVRs, follow-me, time conditions, conferencing …
It is possible to run Asterisk on pretty much any VPS but you’ll definitely have a better experince using a VPS specifically designed for running Asterisk. A couple of features that may not be available with a ‘normal’ VPS is the ztdummy driver and high quality bandwidth.
Having the ztdummy driver available to the VPS means that you’ll be able to use ‘Conferences’, without the driver available to the VPS this feature will not work.
The quality of the network that your VPS is connected to is probably the most important thing when using VOIP. Cheap, poor quality network bandwidth will result in broken and laggy conversations.
I’ve been running Asterisk and FreePBX on an OpenVZ VPS at Synapseglobal for a while now and would definitely recommend them. Even though I am in Atlanta and my server is based in LA calls to the UK, NewZealand and Japan have been excellant.
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Janio:
Hi friend, very nice text!
So Im looking for a VPS to use for hosting fews website not so big, mysql, and also to use asterisk, but only a line to make one or max 2 calls same time…
I found a VPS with total root acess, this case Can I install the ztdummy driver if the server havent?
Sound card is necessary also?
Regards
11 October 2008, 7:19 pmJanio
matt:
Hi Janio,
You will be able to install the ztdummy driver but unfortunately it will not work unless the provider of the VPS also installs it on the VPS master node and makes it available to your VPS. Also, as far as I’m aware, this will only work on OpenVZ/Virtuozzo, not Xen. The good news is that you only need the driver if you want to do conferencing or call recording (and maybe some music-on-hold) - if you don’t need these features then you can just install Asterisk and it will work.
You don’t need access to a sound card to get Asterisk to work.
11 October 2008, 7:38 pm