Thanks for the suggestions. After looking into HFT with several HFT firms I'vehave found that perdictive anlaytics does not work very well on HFT data and is much more profitable on longer time farmes (minutes to hours) so we are runnning on a regular server (remote)
I'm not surprised at this, but keep in mind, many HFTs have a terrifically low cost per order and they also have a tremendous SIZE for each trade. That makes their 15 second trades very lucrative. IOW: with their size and commission advantage, they're making $1000's for 15 seconds; we would be making $10-20 at the most.
Profit is always a function of ability to predict future dynamics, the acccuracy of such predictions, realized and theoritical risk, capital, leverage and opportunity regardless of time granularity. The HFT firms I know have an annual return on capital < 150% which is pretty modest.....perhaps there are others doing better than that, I don't know.
You can use a vps, which may be a cheaper always on alternative. A good trader vps is www.commercialnetworkservices.com . Not the only one, but their customer service is excellent and they have special tweaks specifically designed for traders. And they also have 2 factor security login and an email-to-SMS service free and paid service. Their hyper-v virtualization allows for always on connection, so no forced windows updates or weekly reboots. An always on connection and computer is essential for AT.