Buyer's guide
VICIdial hosting: self-hosted, shared, or dedicated?
VICIdial itself is free. Everything around it — the server, the carrier, the numbers, the tuning and the person who fixes it at 9am — is what you are actually buying. Here is an honest comparison of the three ways to run it, including where our own offer fits and where it does not.
Option 1 — self-hosting
You rent a Linux server, install VICIdial, sign your own carrier agreement, buy your own DIDs and maintain the whole thing. Raw infrastructure might be $40–$80 a month.
Works well when:
- You already employ someone who is comfortable with Asterisk and SIP debugging
- You have an existing carrier relationship on good commercial terms
- You want total control of the build and are willing to own the consequences
Goes badly when:
- Nobody on the team can read an Asterisk log at 2am
- Predictive dialing 'works' but the drop rate is quietly out of compliance
- Security patching slips, because it always slips
Option 2 — shared hosting
This is the $70–$99/month tier you see advertised most. A provider runs one large VICIdial installation and sells seats on it. It is genuinely the cheapest way to get dialing today.
The cost shows up somewhere else. You share an IP and usually a carrier trunk with tenants you cannot see and cannot influence. When one of them runs a campaign that gets flagged, carriers and call analytics providers attribute that behavior to the infrastructure, and answer rates drop across every tenant on it. You did nothing wrong and your connect rate falls anyway. Dial capacity is shared too, so your predictive pacing depends on how hard everyone else is pushing.
Option 3 — dedicated managed hosting
One customer, one virtual machine, one IP address, one VICIdial installation. The provider still handles the build, the carrier, the numbers and the patching, but nothing is pooled. This is what CreatixReach sells.
- Your own IP — your sending reputation reflects only your own campaigns
- Full server capacity available to your agents, so predictive pacing is predictable
- 20 US DIDs per agent included, with automatic caller-ID rotation
- Carrier SIP trunking configured and maintained for you
- From $149.99/mo for 3 agents, scaling to $1,999.99/mo at 60 agents
The honest trade-off: it costs roughly twice what a shared seat costs, and provisioning is not instant because business verification happens first. If your priority is the lowest possible monthly number, shared hosting will beat us. If your priority is answer rates that do not depend on strangers, dedicated wins.
A checklist for any provider you evaluate
- Dedicated or shared? If shared, how many tenants per server, and can you see their compliance record?
- Do you get your own IP address, or is it pooled?
- Who holds the carrier relationship, and can you bring your own trunk?
- How many DIDs are included, and do they rotate automatically across campaigns?
- Is the provider a registered voice service provider, or reselling somebody who is?
- What is the export path for leads, call logs and recordings if you cancel?
- Is support a ticket queue, a human, or a Telegram account that stops replying?
Our answers to all seven are on the hosted VICIdial page, and the operational detail is in the documentation.
Frequently asked questions
- How much does VICIdial hosting cost?
- Shared VICIdial hosting typically advertises $70 to $99 per month, dedicated managed hosting generally runs from around $150 per month upward depending on agent count, and VICIdial's own VICIhost service publishes $1,000 upfront plus $400 per server per month. In every case, call minutes and DID numbers are billed on top. CreatixReach packages start at $149.99 per month for 3 agents and include the dedicated server and 20 DIDs per agent.
- Is VICIdial free?
- The software is free and open source under the AGPL, which is why so many providers can offer it cheaply. What you pay a hosting provider for is the server, the carrier connection, the DID numbers, the installation and dial-plan tuning, and somebody being responsible when the dialer stops dialing at 9am. The licence cost is zero; the operational cost is not.
- Can I host VICIdial myself?
- Yes, and plenty of teams do. Budget for a Linux server, a working Asterisk build, a carrier relationship, DID procurement, dial-plan tuning, database maintenance, security patching and a person who can debug SIP at short notice. Self-hosting is genuinely cheaper in raw infrastructure terms and considerably more expensive once you count the engineering time it consumes.
- Why does a shared VICIdial server hurt caller-ID reputation?
- On a shared server your calls leave from the same IP and often the same carrier trunk as every other tenant. If another tenant runs an aggressive or non-compliant campaign, carriers and analytics providers associate that behavior with the shared infrastructure, and answer rates fall for everyone on it — including you, even if your own campaign was clean.
- What should I ask a VICIdial hosting provider before signing up?
- Ask whether the server is dedicated or shared, whether you get your own IP address, who owns the carrier relationship, how many DIDs are included and whether they rotate, what happens to your data if you cancel, whether the provider is a registered voice service provider, and how quickly a human answers when the dialer breaks.
- Can I migrate an existing VICIdial installation?
- Usually yes. Leads, lists and campaign configuration export from a standard VICIdial installation and can be loaded into a new one. Recordings are ordinary audio files and can be copied across. Talk to support before you cancel your current provider so the export happens while you still have access.
Keep reading
What ships with a dedicated package, and who it is and is not for.
The full build checklist — useful whether we do it or you do.
Move the agent slider and see the exact monthly package price.
TCPA, Do-Not-Call and what we require before a dialer is provisioned.
Want a straight answer about your setup?
Tell us your agent count, your campaign type and where you dial. If dedicated hosting is wrong for you we will say so.