How to run VICIdial on OVH

OVH is one of the largest European cloud and hosting providers, popular with call-center teams who want dedicated hardware at competitive prices. Running VICIdial on OVH is entirely doable, but a few platform quirks around networking and their default firewall will catch you off-guard if you go in blind.

This guide covers what matters most: picking the right instance type, opening the right ports, handling NAT on their shared public-IP products, and storing call recordings without running out of disk mid-campaign. For the broader picture of cloud hosting VICIdial, see running VICIdial in the cloud.

Choosing between OVH VPS and dedicated

OVH offers two distinct tiers: VPS plans (shared hardware, virtualized) and dedicated servers (physical boxes you rent outright). For a VICIdial deployment handling up to 30 concurrent calls, a mid-range VPS with 4 vCPUs and 8 GB RAM is usually enough. A concurrent call (Concurrent calls) is any active voice session consuming a channel at that exact moment, so headroom matters more than raw peak throughput.

For larger deployments — 50+ agents or heavy predictive dialing (Predictive dialing, where the system calls ahead of agents to minimize idle time) — a dedicated Advance or Eco series box is a better fit. The dedicated line gives you guaranteed IOPS for the MySQL tables that VICIdial hammers continuously and eliminates the noisy-neighbor CPU variance you will sometimes see on busy VPS nodes.

OVH firewall and the RTP port range

OVH includes a network-level firewall (their "Network Firewall") that sits in front of your instance and defaults to blocking everything not explicitly allowed. You need to open the SIP signaling port (SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), Session Initiation Protocol, is how calls are set up and torn down) and the RTP media range. RTP (RTP, Real-time Transport Protocol) carries the actual audio packets and needs a wide UDP range.

# On the OVH Network Firewall panel, add these rules:
# TCP 443   inbound  (HTTPS/admin)
# TCP 80    inbound  (HTTP redirect)
# TCP/UDP 5060  inbound  (SIP signaling)
# UDP 10000-20000  inbound  (RTP media)
# TCP 8088  inbound  (Asterisk HTTP/WebSocket if needed)

# Also apply on the OS firewall (ufw example):
ufw allow 5060/udp
ufw allow 5060/tcp
ufw allow 10000:20000/udp

The OVH Network Firewall has a rule limit per IP. If you hit that limit, put the 10000-20000 range as a single UDP rule and group your SIP rules together. Missing or narrowed RTP rules are the most common cause of one-way audio (One-way audio, where you can hear the agent but the called party cannot hear them, or vice versa) on OVH.

flowchart TD
    A[Incoming SIP INVITE] --> B{OVH Network Firewall}
    B -- port 5060 open --> C[Asterisk SIP stack]
    B -- port blocked --> D[Call rejected]
    C --> E{RTP media ports open?}
    E -- UDP 10000-20000 open --> F[Two-way audio]
    E -- ports blocked --> G[One-way audio or silence]

Public IP and NAT on OVH

Most OVH VPS and dedicated servers come with a direct public IPv4 address, meaning your instance sits directly on the public internet with no NAT in the way. That is the preferred setup for VICIdial. You set localnet and externip in your Asterisk SIP or PJSIP configuration to the same public IP, and NAT traversal (NAT traversal, the process of rewriting contact headers so media flows to the correct public address) is handled cleanly.

Disk, recordings, and snapshots

Call recordings (Call recording) accumulate fast. A 30-agent center running eight hours a day generates roughly 5-10 GB of WAV files per day depending on average handle time and stereo settings. OVH VPS plans include a root SSD but no attached volume by default. Budget for an additional block storage volume or an OVH Object Storage bucket for archiving older recordings. For active recording retrieval, local disk is fastest; for long-term retention, offload to object storage on a nightly cron.

OVH offers snapshots for both VPS and dedicated servers, though dedicated snapshots are manual and can take 15-30 minutes depending on disk size. Take a snapshot after every significant configuration change: after the VICIdial install, after trunk provisioning, after any database migration. It is your fastest recovery path. See also cloud snapshots and backups for VICIdial for a deeper look at backup strategy.

Installing VICIdial yourself vs. managed hosting

The VICIdial install on OVH is the same as on any Ubuntu 22.04 box: clone the repo, run the installer, configure your SIP trunk (SIP trunk, the authenticated channel between your box and your carrier), and work through the post-install configuration. On a fresh VPS, allow a few hours to get from bare OS to a dialing campaign. There is no OVH-specific installer or marketplace image for VICIdial, so you are doing it by hand.

If you would rather skip the install and configuration entirely, VICIfast managed plans provision a fully configured, secured VICIdial server on dedicated infrastructure in under 40 seconds. You bring your carrier and leads; we handle everything else.