With a hosted PBX you don’t have to invest in an on-premise phone system, although you may have to buy new IP (Internet protocol) phone sets. That said, you still need to take great care when selecting a hosted service provider.

The PBX, an enterprise-grade IP phone switch, sits at the service provider’s data center, connected to your office either by a dedicated data link, typically a T-1 line, or over a high-speed Internet connection.

You get all the features of a big-company PBX – voice mail, auto attendant, sophisticated call routing, find-me-follow-me features, unified communications (presence, voice mail delivered as e-mail, etc.) – without having to invest tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in a system of your own. 

Instead, you pay the service provider a monthly fee per extension, typically ranging from $30 to $70.

The fact that capital costs are greatly reduced, an attraction on its own for many companies, also means that if you choose poorly for whatever reason, it will be somewhat easier to recover from the error – you can simply move to a different service provider.

Still, it’s obviously better to do the due diligence and make the right decision from the start. Here’s how to go about it.

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Virtual Hosted PBX