3CX hosting in the UK, without the marketing.

The four ways to host 3CX.

3CX is licensed software. The licence is one decision; where the software runs is a separate decision with its own price tag and operational profile. There are four real options.

1. On-premise.

3CX runs on a Debian server in your office — usually a small dedicated Mini PC (Intel NUC class) or a virtual machine on existing office infrastructure. Specifications are modest: a 50-user system runs fine on 4 GB RAM and a 2-core CPU. The Mini PC costs £300–500 once. Power consumption is negligible.

You own the box, the OS, the upgrades, and the failure risk. If the office loses power, the phones go down. If the Mini PC dies, you replace it. If a 3CX security update lands, you apply it. Common in firms with strong existing IT capability, a dedicated server cupboard, or a hard data-locality requirement that excludes cloud entirely.

2. Your own cloud.

3CX runs on a virtual server you rent from AWS, DigitalOcean, Hetzner, Linode, or any other cloud provider. A 50-user 3CX system runs comfortably on a £15/month VPS — 4 GB RAM, 2 vCPU, 80 GB SSD. Larger systems scale linearly: a 200-user deployment fits a £40/month tier.

You manage the OS, the firewall, the backups, the 3CX upgrades. You also own the security boundary — and 3CX exposes a SIP and web administration interface that must be properly hardened. Cheap on raw infrastructure cost (£180–500/year for the VM), but you eat all the operational overhead. Best for firms with in-house Linux competence or an MSP who already manages cloud infrastructure for them.

3. 3CX-hosted (3CX run it themselves).

3CX themselves run your system in their data centres. You buy it self-service via the 3cx.com checkout, separately priced from the licence. Pricing is by SC band:

Prices ex-VAT, snapshot May 2026, source 3cx.com pricelist. 3CX-hosted is excluded from the multi-year discount that applies to licences.

3CX-hosted is easy: you log in, you pick your edition and SC band, you pay, the system is provisioned. The catch is that you're now buying two separate products from 3CX with no integrator handling SIP trunks, handsets, number porting, training, or break-fix support. For a 5-user solicitor's practice, that's fine. For a 35-user accountancy with a peak January season, the operational load lands on whoever in the firm is "good with computers" — typically the person who already has another job.

4. Partner-managed (this is what Port Phones sells).

A UK 3CX partner runs the full stack: licence, hosting infrastructure, SIP trunks, handsets, porting from your old provider, training, and ongoing support. You get one supplier, one bill, one number to call. UK partners usually self-host on their own cloud infrastructure rather than reselling 3CX-hosted — partner margin on raw hosting is thin (and zero on 3CX-hosted's £20/mo at 8 SC), so the operational layer is where the value lives.

Real UK SME pricing for a partner-managed 3CX deal lands at £6–10 per user per month all-in (licence, hosting, SIP, support) for a 25–80 user firm on PRO. See our line-by-line cost decomposition for what goes into that number. The partner you pick matters: see our separate guide to UK 3CX partners.

How to pick.

Three honest decision rules. Use whichever fits your situation.

• Under 10 users, no compliance recording needed: SMB FREE on a £15/mo cloud VPS or a £400 Mini PC at the office. Total cost: under £200/yr. You'll spend a Saturday doing the setup once, then forget it exists. Reasonable if someone in the firm enjoys this kind of thing.
• 10–80 users, no in-house IT, no preference for owning infrastructure: partner-managed. The £6–10/user/month is the right band; below £6 the partner is probably under-supporting you; above £12 they're probably over-spec'ing the SC count. Get a line-by-line quote, not a per-user one.
• Larger than 80 users or strong in-house IT: probably your own cloud, with a partner on a support-only contract rather than a fully-managed one. The economics flip — at 200+ users the partner's hosting and operational layer becomes a meaningful chunk of monthly spend that you can capture in-house.

UK-specific factors.

Data residency and GDPR.

3CX-hosted is provisioned in 3CX's chosen data centres (typically EU regions for UK customers — usually Frankfurt or Amsterdam, sometimes London). Call recordings, voicemails, and CDR data live there. UK-specific data residency is achievable on partner-managed deployments where the partner runs UK-located infrastructure. Port Phones runs hosting in DigitalOcean's London region (LON1); call recordings and CDRs never leave UK soil. For firms with regulated data (legal call recording, healthcare, financial services), UK residency simplifies the audit trail.

Latency and call quality.

3CX is sensitive to network latency on the registration and SIP-signalling layer. UK-hosted PBX talking to a UK SIP provider over a UK ISP gives consistent sub-30ms round-trip times. EU-hosted PBX adds 15–25ms; US-hosted (rare for UK deployments) adds 100ms+. None of these are call-killing, but partner-managed UK-hosted is the cleanest path to consistent call quality.

PSTN switch-off and number porting.

UK Openreach is closing the analogue PSTN network in staged regions through to end of January 2027. Any business still on traditional copper lines or ISDN needs to be on a SIP-based system before their local exchange's deadline. Porting your existing numbers to a 3CX deployment is a 2–4 week process; partner-managed providers handle the paperwork. See our PSTN switch-off guide.

Where Port Phones hosts.

Our 3CX hosting runs on DigitalOcean's LON1 data centre in London (Tier-3 facility, UK data residency, sub-15ms RTT to UK ISPs). We pair it with Gamma SIP trunks for outbound and inbound voice (Gamma routes most UK business landline traffic at the wholesale layer; 3CX has first-class Gamma integration). Our partner tier with 3CX means we can pass multi-year licence discounts straight to customers rather than burying them as a "negotiated rate" marketing bullet — see our partner-tier explainer for what that actually means in £.

Worth saying: our hosting is exactly the kind of thing you could buy direct from 3CX, set up in a weekend, and run yourself. We're a transparent provider — not a moat built on opacity. If you're going to DIY, we'll point you at the right resources. If you want one supplier across licence, hosting, SIP, handsets and support, that's what we sell.