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Hosted PBX is one particularly interesting type of low-cost PBX service that’s available to small businesses. As you may know, a PBX (or “Private Branch Exchange”) is the technological means by which a business can present a single telephone number to its customers and clients, while maintaining a number of different extensions for its employees. For traditional PBX installations, the PBX itself (which is the equipment, which routes incoming calls to the various extensions within your company) is located on your business premises. It might be located in a server room (if your company hosts the infrastructure for its own website) or in a closet dedicated to the PBX.

However, with a Hosted PBX service, you’ll reap the significant benefits of a PBX system, without the inconvenience of running the equipment yourself.

In short, a Hosted PBX service is similar to any other hosted application that your business may use. For example, you’re probably familiar with (and likely use) an Internet email service like those provided by Yahoo, Microsoft or Google. All of the computer servers and equipment that actually make the service work are located at the facilities of those companies. So when you access the service by logging into your account, you’re actually accessing those servers – there’s no special equipment or servers that you need to maintain yourself.

With a Hosted PBX service, the company that provides you the service is actually maintaining all of the PBX equipment for you at its own facilities. So when your business receives a telephone call, that call was actually first received at the service provider’s facilities, and forwarded almost instantly to your office telephone.

As you might expect, when compared to a traditional PBX, the biggest advantage of a Hosted PBX service is lower cost. Signing up for a Hosted PBX service will be much less expensive than acquiring and deploying all the technology necessary for a traditional PBX. When you factor in the probably costs for maintaining traditional PBX equipment over time, the costs of Hosted PBX seem even better in comparison.

In fact, in many cases a hosted PBX service can even offer you more service features than would be available from a traditional PBX system. For example, a Hosted PBX can give you a single telephone number for your entire company, even if you have offices or workers that are located in different parts of the country. This can be an indispensible feature if you have a number of employees or contractors who work from home. It is also a service that providers generally make better on the promise of “unified messaging”, which allows a call to a particular employee to ring their desk phone, cell phone, or other communication device. The system can ring the employee’s various phones in a certain order, or all at once, depending on the employee’s needs. It is a service that can be configured to allow calls between company employees to be made at a cheaper rate, even if one is calling from a personal telephone. And, lastly a hosted PBX can also easily handle communications functions like faxes, conference calling, and integration with CRM programs like Salesforce.

The Hosted PBX can either run over traditional telephone lines, or by using Voice over Internet Protocol (or “VoIP”) technology. When the Hosted PBX is used in conjunction with VoIP transmission, the result is often irresistible for business, in terms of low cost and ease of operation.