We received advance notifications about servers undergoing maintenance (e.g., Montreal-3 on 27 Aug.). The notification said “During this maintenance window, the server will not be available and calls will be re-routed through a backup server.”
Does this require any preparation on the subscriber’s part? For instance, does this affect inbound calls to a DID that is tied to the POP that’s out? It would be useful to have instructions on what to do to keep calls flowing when a server is down for service.
When doing a maintenance, the Voip.ms staff temporarily redirects all the server functions (registration and POP) to another server. This terminates all registrations to terminate forcing the clients to re-register. The client devices think that they are registering on the same server but, in fact, the registration is made on another server.
Beside the re-registration when the maintenance starts and once again when the maintenance is over, nothing else is required. During the maintenance period, even being registered to another server, the incoming calls are working as expected.
As a Voip.ms customer, you don’t have any technical changes to do to keep your phone service working. Just be aware that the re-registration process may cause a few service interruptions for you that should not last more than 5 minutes (check your re-registration delay in your device configuration to be sure). My advice: don’t plan anything important with your phone service during a server maintenance.
If you want to have a higher availability for your outgoing calls, set up a secondary trunk (subaccount) on another server (for example toronto3 if your primary is on montreal7) that the device will switch to if the primary goes does. This secondary trunk will not be able to get incoming calls because your POP is montreal7 but will still be able to make outgoing calls.