Linux vs Windows... Any difference in perforemance is gonna be minor. In both operating systems there are tons of unnecessary services. So, you might want to disable those. Desktop versions of Window are not suitable for running continuously for weeks. You need to reboot the PC regularly to keep the performance at its best. Server Linux vs Desktop Linux. The main difference is what applications are installed and how the system is configured. The server system has all the typical "server" applications such as Web-server, e-mail server etc. The desktop version installs the teh graphic interface and is configure to ryn teh graphic interface on start up. It also comes with applications that require graphic interface. Performance-wise, you prbably won't notice the difference unless you are running concurrently a few aplications that push the system close to the maximum capacity.
One thing that I wouldn't want to give up would be the ability to backtest ideas during off-hours (or mid-session, too, I guess). Latency wouldn't be as critical since no money is actually at stake, though you wouldn't necessarily want a slow download speed for that. Also depends whether you pay for historical data or build your own database. But maybe my point is that, if you like backtesting, you'd need to consider whether that goes on the cloud or if you have the resources to handle that at home (and if you want portable/remote access to your backtesting "workbench").
As far as back-testing, cloud disk space is not cheap compared with purchasing the hardware and housing it locally.
cstfx has the idea. This is what I plan on using it for. Free up my local machines for development and backtesting and execute trades on the cloud. I'm impressed so far with EC2's latency. Looks to be about 2/3 less than what I am now getting through my ISP. One area I'm not impressed is CPU utilization. Even running a few chart programs plus TWS pegs it at 100% consistently. I can run double this load on my home computer and only get half the utilization. I setup a small server and have now moved to the medium and seeing if this makes a difference. One curious thing is that even though the processor is running at 100%, the GUI is still quite responsive and usable. Maybe this is cpu utilization is for billing purposes only .
Check out Rackspace cloudservers also if you are still in the deciding phase. I found an article that seems to give them an edge on performance vs EC2. I don't know anything about Rackspace though and will stick with Amazon for now during this testing phase. I am more concerned with latency and availability and EC2 seems to be stellar in both of those categories. http://www.thebitsource.com/feature...rvers-versus-amazon-ec2-performance-analysis/
Is there a way to ping an IP address? I am trying to ping my AWS using an allocated "Elastic IP Address" (you know, standard IP numbers) from my location and it keeps coming back fail. Any ideas?
ICMP must be blocked from the outside. You can probably open up the firewall settings to allow but I don't know specifically which rules you need to modify. If you are using Windows Server 2008 you can go to Start / Administrative Tools / Windows Firewall with Advanced Security. There are a myriad of rules there. Under Linux, the firewall is usually configured via command line but I don't know which they are loading on EC2.