UISP Hosting: Your Options for Running UISP in the Cloud
UISP manages Ubiquiti's airMAX, airFiber, UFiber and EdgeRouter gear, and it is a different product from UniFi with different hosting choices. There are three routes: Ubiquiti's own UISP hosting, a server you run yourself, or a third-party host.
The short answer
Ubiquiti sells its own UISP cloud hosting, from $29 a month, managed from the UISP portal, with the tiers by device count shown inside the portal.
UISP is free to self-host. It installs on a Linux server, and for a wireless ISP with a rack and staff, that is often the right answer.
We host UISP on a private server for you. You pick a managed host when you want it looked after, want it in a particular region, or want one provider running both your UniFi controllers and your UISP instance. We have hosted UISP for years alongside our UniFi hosting, on the same infrastructure, with the same backups and the same support.
What makes UISP hosting different from UniFi hosting
UISP is heavier and more network-sensitive than a UniFi controller:
- It does more. Device management, outages, CRM and billing for subscribers, network planning and monitoring all live in one application.
- It wants resources. Give it more CPU, memory and disk than an equivalent UniFi controller, particularly with long data retention.
- Backups matter more. A UniFi controller holds configuration. A UISP instance may hold your subscriber and billing records too, which makes a restore a business continuity question rather than an inconvenience.
- Latency is visible. Managing a few hundred radios from a data centre on another continent is noticeably worse than managing them from nearby, so region choice matters more than it does for UniFi.
Questions worth asking any UISP host
- Where is the server, and can I choose? For a wireless ISP, this is the question that most affects daily use.
- What is backed up, how often, and have you restored one? Ask specifically whether subscriber and billing data is included.
- Who applies updates, and when? UISP releases can change behaviour that matters to an operating network.
- What are the limits? Device counts, retention, and what happens when you exceed them.
- What happens when it breaks at 3am? Not the marketing answer, the actual escalation path.
Apply these to us as readily as to anyone else.
Running UISP yourself
A reasonable default for an established operator. You need a Linux server, a domain and certificate, a backup you have actually tested restoring, and a plan for updates. The software is free. The work is not.
The most common reason operators move to a host is not capability, it is that the person who set the server up left, or that nobody is confident the backups work.
Hosting UISP with us
You get the same shape as our UniFi hosting: a private server on dedicated bare-metal hardware we run ourselves, sized for UISP rather than squeezed onto a shared box, nightly encrypted backups of the whole instance, copied to two offsite locations, a hostname and certificate, and a region close to your network (Canada, the US, France, Germany, the UK and Australia today, with other OVHcloud locations such as Singapore on request).
What that means day to day:
- Your instance is yours. No noisy neighbours competing for CPU when your network is busy.
- Backups include everything UISP holds, not just device configuration.
- We handle the server, you run the network. Updates, disk, certificates and monitoring are ours; your radios and subscribers stay yours.
- One provider for both. Plenty of our customers run UniFi controllers with us and put their UISP alongside them, on one bill and one support channel.
Tell us your device count, where your network is and what you are running now, and we will tell you exactly what it will cost and how the move would work. Email [email protected].
UISP, UniFi, airMAX, airFiber, UFiber and EdgeRouter are trademarks of Ubiquiti Inc. Cloud UniFi is an independent hosting provider and is not affiliated with, authorised by or endorsed by Ubiquiti Inc.