How to run VICIdial on Vultr

Vultr has a straightforward control panel, competitive per-hour billing, and data centers on every major continent. Those qualities make it a reasonable choice for hosting a VICIdial dialer close to your agents or your carrier. The platform does not add much in the way of surprises, but the firewall group configuration and instance sizing decisions are worth doing deliberately.

This guide focuses on what is Vultr-specific. For the broader decisions — region selection, latency tuning, and carrier connectivity — see running VICIdial in the cloud.

Instance type and size

Vultr's Cloud Compute line (the standard VPS tier) works for light to mid-range VICIdial use. For a center running up to 25 concurrent calls (Concurrent calls, the total number of active voice channels at any moment), a 4-vCPU, 8 GB plan is a workable starting point. You will want more if you run stereo recording (Stereo recording, where the agent and caller are recorded on separate channels, which roughly doubles the disk write rate and codec CPU) or if you run a busy predictive dialer.

Vultr's High Frequency Compute instances use NVMe storage and higher clock-speed CPUs. For VICIdial, the MySQL I/O benefit of NVMe is real. If your campaign runs continuous predictive dialing (Predictive dialing, the mode that dials multiple numbers ahead of free agents) the High Frequency line is worth the modest cost premium.

Firewall groups and the RTP port range

Vultr uses "Firewall Groups" — reusable rule sets you attach to one or more instances. Create a dedicated group for your VICIdial servers so you can apply the same rules consistently. The critical ports are SIP (SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), the signaling protocol that establishes and ends calls) on port 5060, and the RTP audio range (RTP, the UDP packets that carry voice samples) on UDP 10000-20000.

flowchart LR
    A[Carrier SIP INVITE] --> B{Vultr Firewall Group}
    B -- 5060 allowed --> C[Asterisk]
    B -- 5060 blocked --> D[Call fails]
    C --> E{RTP media}
    E -- UDP 10000-20000 open --> F[Audio flows]
    E -- range blocked --> G[One-way audio]

# Vultr Firewall Group rules (set in control panel):
# Inbound TCP/UDP  5060         Any    (SIP signaling)
# Inbound UDP      10000-20000  Any    (RTP media)
# Inbound TCP      443          Any    (HTTPS/admin panel)
# Inbound TCP      22           Your IP (SSH)

# ufw on the instance:
ufw allow 5060
ufw allow 10000:20000/udp
ufw allow 443/tcp

Public IP and NAT considerations

Vultr Cloud Compute instances have a direct public IPv4 address with no NAT. This is the correct setup for VICIdial and Asterisk. Your SIP trunk (SIP trunk, the authenticated SIP connection between Asterisk and your carrier) registers from the instance's public IP, and RTP flows without rewriting. If you deploy into a Vultr VPC and give the instance only a private address, you must configure NAT traversal (NAT traversal, the Asterisk settings that correct the contact address in outgoing SIP packets so your carrier can reach you back). Stick to a public-IP instance unless you have a specific reason for the VPC isolation.

Vultr does not offer a native equivalent of floating/reserved IPs at the same level of flexibility as some competitors. If your carrier ties its allowlist or authentication to your IP, factor in that rebuilding an instance gives you a new IP unless you manage an elastic IP through their load balancer or bring your own IP block.

Disk and recording storage

Call recordings (Call recording) mount up faster than most people expect. At 30 agents, 8 hours of dialing, with average 3-minute calls, you are writing several thousand recordings per day. Start with a Vultr Block Storage volume (not the Droplet root disk) attached at /var/spool/asterisk/monitor. Block storage survives instance rebuilds. For archiving older files, Vultr Object Storage is S3-compatible and integrates easily with a nightly rclone job.

For context on how other providers handle the same problem, see running VICIdial on Linode/Akamai, which also relies on separate block storage for recordings.

The self-install path and the alternative

Vultr has no marketplace VICIdial image. You spin up Ubuntu 22.04, run the VICIdial installer, configure Asterisk, set up your dialplan (Dialplan, the Asterisk extension logic that routes calls to queues and agents), and wire your SIP trunk. The first install takes several hours; subsequent rebuilds are faster once you have a snapshot.

If you would rather skip the install and go straight to dialing, VICIfast managed plans stand up a fully configured VICIdial server in under 40 seconds. You bring your carrier credentials and lead list; the server arrives ready.