4 ms·

Meaning offer free VoIP?

by aviv 8y ago

devwastaken 8y ago
Yes.
- aviv 8y ago
  Why not go with bare metal from say OVH for this type of service? Running a free VoIP service on top of a cloud provider is kind of silly, not just from a cost perspective, but also having shared resources for your voice/WebRTC media servers. But then the question is, why offer free VoIP service to begin with? You're going to invite a lot of abuse and fraud attempts very quickly. Sure you can guard against that, but is it really worth it? There's a massively booming VoIP industry right now (despite the perception of "too many players" in the market). Go out there and make money while providing good affordable service. Charge $10-$15 per line while the big guys ask for $25-$50. VoIP seats add up fast, and it's very nice MRR with not a lot of hassle if you run things right and give customers tools to get things done without calling for support for every little thing. Or go the route that Dialpad is taking with their limited Free product (dialpad.com/free) which is kind of a bait-and-switch because surely a business will need to convert to a paid subscription of some sort if they don't end up going out of business in the first few months.
  - devwastaken 8y ago
    I'm talking about VoIP as in Mumble, Teamspeak, Discord, etc. And i am talking about bare metal, but dynamic hardware resources would require some sort of virtualization, but if doable without needing to be the size of Google could be a good business because you don't need to completely reserve hardware and a bandwidth line.
    - mmt 8y ago
      > i am talking about bare metal, but dynamic hardware resources would require some sort of virtualization This is a bit confusing, as "bare metal" is usually used as a contrast to virtualization, although it I suppose it could mean "not cloud" (but further muddled by AWS offering "bare metal" instance types). More importantly, though, if you're thinking of some kind of VPS provider, where you'd dynamically allocate and de-allocate servers from their inventory, there's no reason you couldn't run directly on the hardware with no hypervisor. Virtualization is only strictly necessary for multi-tenancy, such as if you need to allocate only half of a server.

Meaning offer free VoIP?

by aviv 8y ago

Meaning offer free VoIP?

devwastaken 8y ago

Yes.

aviv 8y ago
Why not go with bare metal from say OVH for this type of service? Running a free VoIP service on top of a cloud provider is kind of silly, not just from a cost perspective, but also having shared resources for your voice/WebRTC media servers. But then the question is, why offer free VoIP service to begin with? You're going to invite a lot of abuse and fraud attempts very quickly. Sure you can guard against that, but is it really worth it? There's a massively booming VoIP industry right now (despite the perception of "too many players" in the market). Go out there and make money while providing good affordable service. Charge $10-$15 per line while the big guys ask for $25-$50. VoIP seats add up fast, and it's very nice MRR with not a lot of hassle if you run things right and give customers tools to get things done without calling for support for every little thing. Or go the route that Dialpad is taking with their limited Free product (dialpad.com/free) which is kind of a bait-and-switch because surely a business will need to convert to a paid subscription of some sort if they don't end up going out of business in the first few months.
- devwastaken 8y ago
  I'm talking about VoIP as in Mumble, Teamspeak, Discord, etc. And i am talking about bare metal, but dynamic hardware resources would require some sort of virtualization, but if doable without needing to be the size of Google could be a good business because you don't need to completely reserve hardware and a bandwidth line.
  - mmt 8y ago
    > i am talking about bare metal, but dynamic hardware resources would require some sort of virtualization This is a bit confusing, as "bare metal" is usually used as a contrast to virtualization, although it I suppose it could mean "not cloud" (but further muddled by AWS offering "bare metal" instance types). More importantly, though, if you're thinking of some kind of VPS provider, where you'd dynamically allocate and de-allocate servers from their inventory, there's no reason you couldn't run directly on the hardware with no hypervisor. Virtualization is only strictly necessary for multi-tenancy, such as if you need to allocate only half of a server.