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Question regarding Virtuial Private Servers. I currently trade on Commercial Network Services and have had no problem with them, but it seems expensive to me @ $95/mo. Wndering if anyone has had any experience with a lower cost provider? Wonder if you get what you pay for....
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
Dependw what they use as server. REAL servers are expensive. Maintenance is expensive. As is networking. CHeap servers most likely mean... hm.... more load = worse performance.
WHAT are you getting for 95USD / Month? Saying "vps" is like saying "a car", it can vary a lot. I have virtual machines from 512mb to 8gb at the moment, with different performance requirements.
I wa asked to go into some details what good offers are. Here we go - you have no chacne to know
Technically, you need:
* Enough RAM to run nicely, without the host overcommiting. Hyper-V frmo MS is good in that - does not allow the VPS to have more memory than the host has.... which would force the host to swap.
* Enough CPU power to handle all loads and aceptable spikes. SADLY you simply dont know how that looks. FOr that, you need statistics about the HOST (!) CPU usage over time (not the one from the clients). Or at least statistics about the policies of the hoster how much he loads.
* An appropriate IO subsystem. Again, you ahve no knowledge normally, though hsoters will say that a litle more. On normal computers, the discs are the bottleneck - on A VPS they are so ten times over. I run a 64gb host at the moment (for my company, my trading, some small hosting - for consulting customers and prety much my own stuff, nothing I offer on the market). For this I RIGHT NOW have a Raid 10 with 6x10k Velociraptor as storage, and I Will soon go to 8 discs. This works REALLY nice and REALLY fast - except during patch times (30-35 machines hitting it at the same time with scans of their images is hell). Service pack day? An admin does them manually, 4-6 at a time. Databases? Too slow for market data - another Raid 10 of 6 discs is there ONLY (!) for my trading backend.
At the end it really depends what you need - this is why I was asking what the hoster had. Low end server, little ram, small CPU slice? WAAAAY to expensive. My db server equivalent (4 cores, 8gb ram, assigned discs) - pretty cheap. Does it incldue licenses? Puts the price down even further.
The main problem when purchasing a VPS sis that you have zero control over the host. Back in my days at Microsoft we had a policy (and it is sin still now): No performance tickets (sql server enterprise support) on virtual platforms UNLESS yuo have control over the host. Server was slow 2 in the morning? WHo knows why - if it is a VPS I would need to see the statistics OF THE HOST. I dont care about the VPS. SLow disc IO may be because hey, half the other VM's were running anti virus scans at this time.
This is one reason I went at the ned with my own infrastructure - I KNOW what I have, host wise, and can thus get an idea how good things look in relity, not just on a VPS.
The platform I'm on is a Traders Virtual Desktop (x64) 2GB RAM, 15G hard drive, 1000GB traffic, Power (CPU Share) 4 CPU CORES INCLUDED, Windows 2003 R2 (Hyper-V) at $95.00/month. As I said, I'm not unhappy with the service, I just think there might be cheaper alternatives.
I trade on the TradeStation platform. No complicated algos, just 8 windows that autotrade on a trend/counter-trend and gap fill basis. Probably average about 50 trades/month - all day trades.
No random reboots, updates are on Saturday...I really don't do anything with it, except monitor it. Again - maybe there are cheaper alternatives, would love to hear what others are doing.
Sadly that does not really say a lot. 2gb - ok, that is nice. 15gb hard disc is tiny. 4 cpu cures included, shaerd - does not really say how much you have there.
That said, I think the price is quite ok. Dont forget you have out of business day maintenance there (Saturday). You probably also should have hosting with connetiosn to financial networks as fast as possible, though I am not sure TradeStation is good there to take advantage from that. If you save 20-30 USD there per month, it wont make a difference in money, but may in quality of service you get when things get bad.
We have started something with some Elite members (details in this thread, but you can't read it...), I will send you some details by PM, you may be interested by the idea.
dgresens - CND seems have location only in NYC, san diego and not Chicago.
so for CME, like TF, 6E, that are n Chicago, you are NOT close to them. of course it depends where your brokers servers are .But how good are your fills with your strategy?
