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It's a bit tricky, I'll try to provide something useful.
The information I'll provide here are valid for the VPS we provide, not generic hosting providers like AWS or OVH, or my pseudo competitors in the trading VPS business which are renting machines to generic hosting providers and don't manage they infrastructure. For these you should multiply by about 10 the amount of CPU cores required. While having to multiply by 10 looks crazy it's a fact (I've tested an 8 cores competitor machine which was slower than my 1 core...).
So beside the CPU aspects, which is rarely a problem on our machines, the key aspect is the RAM.
The base memory footprint (the RAM used by an "empty" application) is quite low with NinjaTrader (7 and 8) and for SierraChart (below 0.5 GB).
IB TWS and IB Gateway, like all Java based apps, are very RAM consuming: TWS can quickly ask for 2 GB with a relatively light workspace.
TradeStation also need a good amount of RAM: TS recommends 4 cores/8 GB as the minimum setup, but in fact it can run pretty well (in using a not too crazy workspaces) with 4 GB.
But then it's what's running in the app, and this is where things becomes more difficult to measure, as the resources required depends on:
- the number of charts/DOM's/windows open
- the amount of historical data loaded in each chart
- the bar type
- the indicators/strategies loaded
A light NinjaTrader 8 workspace will run fine with 1 core/1.5 GB (still, having another core is not a bad idea), while an NT8 with 50 charts full of indicators based on ticks, with 365 days of historical data loaded, can be very busy with 8 cores/32 GB.
A simple way to size correctly is to open your trading app on your own machine, and measure the RAM/CPU usage in launching a Windows task manager, find your app process name and check its usage. It's a bit more difficult to find out with TradeStation and MultiCharts which have a multiple of sub-processes but it's doable.
@rickbw: while it's possible to use Excel (or OpenOffice) directly on the VPS, as additional apps are asking for RAM (so the prices goes up), I recommend to have Excel (or a web browser if it's required) running on the user own desktop/laptop, and copy files or data from the VPS to the local spreadsheet. Copy/paste from the VPS to the user desktop is as simple a a copy paste between two apps on your local machine, so it's not a big loss of time.
And to finish:
- we have a small app installed on each VPS which will send an email if a program has crashed or if the machine starts to be short in RAM. So if the configuration is a bit short in RAM the user will know it before it's too late.
- if the user did not choose the right configuration it's quick (2 minutes) and easy to upgrade or downgrade the machine. The VPS will have to be stopped but nothing will be lost, it will be the exact same machine with more (or less) resources.
