How 3CX creates reliability at scale with DigitalOcean

3CX is a complete communications platform for businesses looking for a simple and affordable solution for calls, video, and live chat. The organization is one of the fastest-growing communications solutions in the market, available on-premise on Windows /Linux as well as a cloud-hosted solution. 3CX includes free mobile apps, video conferencing, live chat, and WhatsApp, Facebook and CRM integration - making it an all-encompassing communications system.

3CX was born out of a simple need for a new phone system that was reliable, feature-rich, and affordable at a time when VoIP was still an emerging technology. In 2005, the majority of phone systems were hardware-based, proprietary, and extremely expensive. Nick Galea, 3CX founder, was struggling to find a phone system for his business that was software-based, could connect remote offices, and could be managed by the internal IT team. When nothing could be found, he created one. Now, more than 600,000 customers in 190 countries trust 3CX to help their businesses connect and collaborate.

Reliability at scale at an affordable price

3CX launched 3CX StartUP in May 2022, a cloud-native solution made to specifically address the communication requirements of startups and smaller businesses. Its reliable set-and-forget system is equipped with sophisticated call center features such as call queues and IVRs, ready to serve teams of up to 10 users completely FREE! For teams up to 20, StartUP PRO edition unlocks even more choice with call reporting, choice of SIP trunks, and training tools added to the bundle. Best part? Both require zero internal tech support. By bundling smaller installs on a shared instance, 3CX can manage setup, installation, and system updates while minimizing communication costs for the end users.

To adequately support its business aspirations, 3CX needed to have reliable resources supporting its operation and found that DigitalOcean’s products were a match. The simplicity and pricing model stood out amongst competition, and afforded the company better flexibility to sustainably meet growing customer demand.

3CX Hosting infrastructure uses DigitalOcean Droplets and Debian 10 virtual machines with 3CX pre-installed to match its configuration to individual customer needs. In just one year, the company was able to get more than 20,000 customers up and running in a hosted environment; this included scheduled backups, implementation of disaster recovery solutions, and live monitoring to proactively prevent errors before they become customer issues.

3CX also offers a DigitalOcean marketplace image for customers who want to go self hosted.

Building a solid platform

From the get go 3CX was determined to create a solid, problem-free hosting offering and it has been working towards that goal. The various services involved are constantly being fine-tuned to improve reliability, performance and security. Just recently, the 3CX Hosting team, in coordination with DigitalOcean, has flawlessly undertaken the task of upgrading all of the free and commercial hosted machines with lower specs to double CPU, Memory and Disk capacity. This helped to significantly improve user experience and system stability. To take it up a notch, 3CX also developed a new and more advanced monitoring platform, to help engineers address alerts and potential issues in a much faster and more efficient way.

Future plans

3CX will continue to ensure that customers with hosted installations on DigitalOcean are well served. The organization plans to continue adding features to its communications system to assist businesses with improving their customer service. The all in one solution helps reduce the number of apps a company has to juggle. Having everything centralized on one platform offers customers limitless ways to get in touch and guarantees all customer information is readily available to the contact center agent. Irrespective of the medium used to get in touch, queries can be resolved quicker by allowing for collaboration internally with the team.