What is Hybrid-Hosted?

Fonality's Hybrid-Hosted business model requires that customer's suspend their traditional understanding of Premise vs. Hosted phone systems, and entertain a different way to enjoy the benefits of both solutions without any of the pitfalls.

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The graphic above describes the Hybrid-Hosted model graphically, and we offer the following brief explanation on Hybrid-Hosted below.  For full information, please search for Hybrid-Hosted on one of our product sites.

Hybrid-Hosted Backs Up Your Configuration

One of the three main benefits to Hybrid-Hosted is the automatic backup of all configuration files required for the operation of your system.

What's backed up?

1. All FONcore configuration files (the files created when you do things within the Admin Panel)

2. All phone configuration files (the files that tell the phone what extension to display, how to dial, how long to ring, etc.)

3. All phone master configuration files (aastra.cfg and sip.cfg for Aastra and Polycom phones respectively)

What is not backed up?

Due to their size and the bandwidth requirements, audio such as voicemail, voice prompts, music on hold, and call recordings are only stored on the local PBX server.  You can download these from the web admin panel (or user panel in the case of voicemail).

If a meteor ever hits your PBX, you will have to re-record or upload any voice prompts used on your call menus and voicemail greetings, but otherwise the replacement server will function just like the old server.

If you have a Live Backup Server, that also carries a duplicate local copy of your audio files.

Why do my files change when I edit them?

If you're a rather experienced phone system administrator, you may take it upon yourself to make manual edits to the files that live on your server.  You may then notice that these files are automatically changed and/or moved and the settings you configured do not 'stick'. 

Whenever you make a change to your Admin Panel - the change is written to the backup directory for your server at Fonality.  The change is then pushed to your actual server.  Please re-read this statement - when you make changes to your server, you are actually making changes to the backup copies stored on our Data Cluster.  You're not actually changing your server.  

So when you make a manual change to a configuration file on your server, and you then make a change within the Admin Panel, the backup copy that we have is pushed to your server and over-writes your manual change.

But I don't want the Admin Panel to over-write my changes

There are three options available:

1. Don't make changes to your Admin Panel

2. Manually keep backups of your changes and then copy those changes into the actual configuration files via a cron job or some other script

3. Set your files as immutable but understand that whatever you do via the Admin Panel will not be pushed to your server

How do I do #2 and #3 above?

Fonality will not tell you unfortunately.  It's not that we do not wish to help you, it's that we don't wish to provide information that may potentially harm your server if used incorrectly.  If you are familiar with Linux, you can quickly Google for the 'howto' instructions relevant to Steps 2 & 3 above.  If you aren't familiar with Linux, you may unintentionally run a command that could harm your system.  This would take your server offline and prevent you from doing business.  We certainly do not wish to lead you down a path that may be harmful, so we do not publish instructions that we consider advanced. 

I want to Administrate my server with an Admin Panel stored on the local machine!

Sorry - that's not what Hybrid-Hosted is.  Hybrid-Hosted does not include Admin Panel software installed on your Premise hardware.  It never will - that would defeat the second major benefit of our technology: Anywhere-Administration.

Anywhere-Administration is Freedom

Freedom to perform moves, adds, and changes from any Internet-capable device with a browser.  You don't need to be onsite.  This frees your tech-staff from having to constantly be onside in order to do their jobs.  They have more freedom to work from home or take a working lunch because Fonality's Hybrid-Hosted model enables them to do their job from anywhere. 

The Last Major Benefit - Stand-Alone Operation

The last important point of Hybrid-Hosted is breaking up a single solution into multiple points of failure.  In traditional IT thinking, multiple points of failure = bad.  However, with Hybrid-Hosted, should the Admin Panel become unavailable, the system runs normally because the configuration files already written into the server are not affected.  The system, as it were, has no idea that the Admin Panel is unavailable.  Therefore you can lose your Internet connection and still make and receive phone calls (as long as your business doesn't depend on a SIP Trunk that uses the Internet connection).