How to minimize 3CX Cost in Google Cloud Usage

[tony28]

On average, how much does it cost to run 3CX on Google Cloud?
I have run it for 5 days and barely used it and already used $6.
Someone mentioned it costs him only is 3€/month, Is that possible?
What 3CX settings should I check to minimize usage?

 

[cobaltit]

You aren't really billed for usage, your billed for resources. If you pick an instance that costs $20/month it's going to cost you $20/month, whether your CPU usage is 2% or 100%. What size instance did you pick?

 

[tony28]

I used n1-standard-1 (1 vCPU, 3.75 GB memory)

 

[cobaltit]

That's the problem. That's way more machine then what you probably need. f1-micro is what most small 4/8SC systems are run on.

 

[tony28]

but f1-micro and g1-small memory is < 2GB hardware requirements.
How did get google to display the pricing you got?
Is the f1-micro still offered as free tier?
With f1-micro, 3CX uses up 65% RAM right away.
I'll try g1-small.

 

[cobaltit]

Remember, 3CX will run on a Pi which has 1GB of memory. And yes we managed several small instances which run fine on f1-micro. Swap helps. I was just snipping the pricing from here:

https://cloud.google.com/compute/all-pricing

 

[florink]

As already mentioned, small memory + swap = win. If all you care about is cost, then go for OVH, Vult, etc which offer very cheap services. However, don't expect Google's reliability.

Also keep in mind that Google charges extra for static IPs. Beware when you are ticking boxes

I usually start from f1-micro with swap. In MOST cases this is perfectly fine. If an installation ever needs more I just upgrade accordingly. Don't be scared of the low specs, 3CX PBX has a very small footprint and optimized services.

 

[tony28]

Wouldn't swap file slow things down? How big should swap be?
when you talk about small instances, how many users?

 

[cobaltit]

It's not so much users as things like transcoding, recording, queues, reporting, etc.

 

[AWS2P]

on very small instance you need to use as basic as possible otherwise you need to step up VM level

 

[Mark Phillips]

For the last 6 months, I have been running a production 3CX with 4SC and about 25 physical extensions in Azure on a B1 with 1GB ram. It reports it is using about 650MB ram most of the time. I have also configured a swap file as a precaution.

 

[Evolute IT]

You want something cheap but reliable? Go with Lightsail. We just moved all our PBX there. No issues at all.

 

[cobaltit]

Lightsail is good. I move our production instance around and I've done Azure, GCP, AWS, Lightsail as well as a few no-name KVM providers. All have worked fine. Lightsail is a cut above the small VM providers and slightly under the big 3 (Azure, GCP AWS) as it doesn't have some of the advanced features they have. But for a simple, fixed budget instance Lightsail is the best I think.

 

[tony28]

What are some advance features missing from Lightsail that maybe important?
I read somewhere that "small instances PBXexpress will create soon swap-files automatically ", does that mean it will create the swap file automatically?

 

[tony28]

for f1-micro, is 1.2GB swap file good enough or 2GB
Are the commands below correct
dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1M count=1200
chmod 600 /swapfile
mkswap /swapfile
swapon /swapfile
swapon -s

 

[StefanW]

I would not use a f1-micro they are very small and would go for production workload one up onto small.
For the swap just run this as root "sudo apt-get install dphys-swapfile" and you will be sorted.

 

[FS_Mathieu]

3€/month excluding taxes

 

[StefanW]

View attachment 12033

3€/month excluding taxes

This is OVH I assume. s1 instances are not quite comparable as the have no Host-Redundancy (just a local Raid) and the resources are not 100% committed to you. Sill for the price it is a good service they offer!

 

[FS_Mathieu]

Right tho but still nice price quality, I had no prob with OVH instances and support is quite fine

 

[tony28]

For production, is it reliable to use raspberry pi as SBC?