Thanks so much ScoobyStoo. Very much appreciated! Since you use their dedicated server/basic mgmt service that means you install your app on their servers. Correct? Do they provide a VPN or any remote connection software for you to remotely control/view your system. How do you remotely connect to you system? Also do you have any concerns about the security of your Intellectual Property, especially as you are using their servers? What happens to the data & applications stored on this server, when you terminate your service or move elsewhere? How about data backups. Thanks so much again for helping this novice....
Yep. Terminal Services. There are far more things to worry about in this business than people stealing your IP. Take the usual precautions to protect it and then forget about it. Reformat the drive if you are worried. When any company like Steadfast release a box the first thing they do is reimage the drive. I personally don't need them. All the data my app needs is held in memory for performance reasons. It never hits the HD. If you need them then Steadfast offer a backup service I believe. No probs. You strike me as someone who doesn't have a huge amount of IT experience so I'm happy to help out.
For a HFT type strategy it gets harder, essentially if you have fast DMA (direct market access) they would be forced to either throttle your orders (slow them down) so they could evaluate before you execute, or they would just mirror your trades and be slightly less profitable. Mirroring programs are common.
Advantage Futures is a broker that does now pose a conflict of interest as they do not have in-house proprietary trading. They are completely execution.
search google for "cloud server" or "cloud vps". 100% guaranteed uptime on cloud servers. Thats the technology google uses for its servers. search google for "100tb cloud sever". 100tb is very good host and you will get a cloud server for lesser than half the price of 700$US/pm. i have some knowledge about web hosting so recommending you a cloud server instead of a dedicated server. If there is any problem on cloud server then the cloud server can be shifted to another working one within minutes(due to which we get 100% uptime). So you dont have to get worried about hardware failure when hosted on a cloud server. If a dedicated server goes down due to hardware failure, you have to wait till the host detects the failure(or you inform the host about failure) then wait till the hardware gets replaced. i am not a web host or related with the above one or any other. i am a trader like you and giving info since you asked. Happy trading!
::search google for "cloud server" or "cloud vps". 100% guaranteed ::uptime on cloud servers. Thats the technology google uses for its ::servers. And then learn programming in a 100% stateless fashion so that this actually works - which is kind of hard for strategies. Search engine (effectively read only) is a different ball game. Easy to achieve 100% uptime. ::If there is any problem on cloud server then the cloud server canbe ::shifted to another working one within minutes(due to which we get ::100% uptime) Ah - NO. Absolutely not. If the hardware of the server hosting your trading system crashes (for one of many reasons - blown ram, processor, whatever) then the trading system image restarts on another computer. But this IS DOWNTIME. It is not 100% uptime. Whoever sells this as such is - brutally speaking - someone who should server burgers at McDonalds. There is a technology from VmWare allowing 100% uptime in cases the OS does not crash. They basically mirror all memory changes on another computer. This requires a LOT of special ahrdware, though (=expensive) and is not the fastest. It is a lot of overhead (we talk infiniband here) an the license alone is - hm - "interesting" in price. The classical approach for 100% uptime is "no single point of failure" and "accept downtime in a part, but have the system work still". This is hard to do for strategies.
futurestradingc, this is true for uptime and processing time but you have to keep in mind that clouds are not necessarily located in places where the time it take from the exchange to your server will be optimal. I am taking physically and connectivity. You have to be aware of the ping time and the route the info takes to get to your cloud over the internet.
also, keep in mind, with clouds, you're one step further abstracted from bare metal with the inherent virtualization and this comes with a performance penalty. it does have its trade-offs.
That actually is IT. Best you can do - and on my planned list - is to put a 1 rach height 2 computer node into a data center close to Globex some point next year. SuperMicro and Tyan have nice units - fit two small motherboards into one small server (1 unit high), both capable of running 2 processors, 128gb memory, 4 hard discs each. The computers are totally separate, in trays. This gives one a small cluster with high uptime pretty much guaranteed. Right now i run of a multi computer cluster (currently 4, 2 retiring next week - simply way too outdated) in a normal data center. That said, my financial "envelope" so far for this move would be pretty low - problem is mostly that I sturggle finding any trading approach for Globes where 50ms or so make a significant difference. And if I am not making sense, I am not going to spend too much to move closer to the exchange.