Platform, Security & Integrations / Reliability & Continuity

High Availability & Hot Standby

A second server stays fully synced with your primary system in real time and takes over automatically within seconds if the primary ever fails — your team keeps making and receiving calls without needing to notice anything happened. This is called hot standby (see Glossary): a “hot,” fully-ready backup rather than one that needs to be manually switched on.

Why does this matter for my business?

Your phone system isn’t just a convenience — it’s how customers reach you, how orders come in, and how your team stays connected. A single point of failure on that system means a hardware fault or a software crash can take your business off the phone entirely, sometimes for hours. Hot standby removes that single point of failure so an outage becomes a non-event instead of an emergency.

How fast is the failover, really?

The backup server continuously mirrors the primary system’s configuration and call data, and monitors it with automatic health checks. If the primary stops responding, the backup takes over (a failover — see Glossary) in near-real time — typically fast enough that a call in progress may barely be interrupted, and new calls are unaffected.

Do I need to do anything to trigger the switch?

No. The system detects the failure and switches over on its own. You’ll get an automatic notification (by email or system alert) that a failover occurred, so your team knows to check on the primary server, but nothing needs to be done manually to keep the phones working.

Is this the same thing as disaster recovery?

They’re related but different. High availability/hot standby protects against a single server failing, typically with the backup sitting in the same location. Disaster Recovery goes further, protecting against a whole-site event (like a building losing power or internet) by keeping a backup in a separate physical location or region.

Does this require extra hardware or cost?

Yes — a hot standby setup requires a second, dedicated redundancy server in addition to your primary system. We’ll help you size that requirement based on your business’s tolerance for downtime and scope it into your deployment plan.