I am into voip as a hobby....waste so much time on it, if I worked as many hours, I'd make some good money!
I have a question for you guys. Currently I am using a LEB for a hosted Asterisk voip server on OpenVZ with low specs and it's working OK, sometimes it goes down, but as I just use it for home calls (and I'm at home most of the time so) it's not a huge deal (at the minute), but could be once I start work in a few months time.
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 131072 42112 88960 0 0 22644
-/+ buffers/cache: 19468 111604
Swap: 524288 112 524176
Was thinking of getting rasperberry Pi, but think it's overpriced and over hyped and fragile! So I recently purchased two 10ZIG Model 5402 thin clients each with 512MB RAM, 512MB DOM (flash disk), 500MHz Eden processor, no moving parts or fans, which consume around 8-10 Watts. They run 10ZIG linux software which has Firefox, RDP, VNC etc on it already. I was thinking of wiping this an putting asterisk on it and having a home voip server.
Plus points of this :-
-£~10 of electricity/year
-at home so if it breaks down (unlikely) I can just fix it easily
-??easier to configure/backup as it is physically present
-less likely that some one will try to hack it (someone has tried to hack my hosted asterisk several times)
-could also use as a bittorrent/NAS/usenet downloader during 'off peak' time (0000-0700 hrs)
Negative:-
-I have ADSL 10meg down/1 meg up Be broadband internet - so it would use my own upload bandwidth although I not a heavy user of internet so this may no be a problem
-Voice quality - what will it be like?? Have used home server with 3CX once before and it was OK but was on Virgin BB and had decent upload speed at the time, plus a pretty static IP address.
-Hassle - configuring ports/opening ports on a ISP supplied consumer grade shitty routers with not much QoS config
-Cost - £10 electricity- probably could do this on a £3-6 OpenVZ LEB (eg HTTPzoom/Lowendspirit) with say 96MB saving a whopping £4-7 :-), but will probably go for a 128 KVM plan, with Asterisk and GUI software so more likely a £10-13 LEB (eg Crowncloud or Torqhost 256MB- if I could get a 128MB that would be great)
-Won't have a LEB to tinker with :-(
Can anyone think of any other plus/negative points?
What do you guys vote? LEB hosted Asterisk PBX or Home Server PBX?
PS: I have a spare 10ZIG thin client if anyone wants one - PM for price if interested.