Using a VPS service buys you a ton of peace of mind for pennies of outlay…
Which looks more secure, this bank of high end servers in a maximum security centre or your PC?
A VPS service – Virtual Private Server – is basically your own separate, dedicated PC environment running 24 hours a day on someone else’s computer network. More technically, the service runs on a remote bank of servers hosted by a provider hiring out space and bandwidth on these servers to the public.
In other words, you can forget about having any trading software on your local PC and set up your entire trading environment on this remoteserver, as well as any other software that you may incidentally want to run there.
Most often, people use a VPS as a fail-safe mechanism in addition to running programs on their local PC. However, more and more, folks are shifting to this “cloud” concept for their entire trading strategy.
There are many reasons for using a VPS service when you trade forex, most important among them:
- A VPS provides an uninterrupted power supply (UPS) service for you, meaning that if your local PC dies or your Internet connection goes down, the VPS remains active, continuing to run your programs. This is certainly true of the better VPS services which have a guaranteed up time of way above 99%.
- You can run programs such as automated forex trading robots on a VPS 24/7. This means you can turn your PC off and go about your life secure in the knowledge that your program has the best possible chance of doing its job.
- Depending on the service you sign up for, there are varying levels of technical support available should you strike any problems, wish to upgrade etc
- You don’t have to use your own PC or laptop or other device in order to accessyour programs. Any PC/laptop/tablet/mobile device capable of accessing the Internet enables you to connect to your programs running on the VPS and monitor or maintain as appropriate.
- Leaving the best until last: with a reputable forex VPS provider you will get absolutely minimal slippage due to the fact that their whole business model centres around the fastest access to the data streams your trading orders are transmitted through. For example, the VPS provider I use currently for my forex robot trading – Beeks VPS – locates their forex specific servers in London and New York as close as it is possible to the data feeds for the major liquidityproviders in forex trading.The importance of this cannot be overstated if you are running forex robots. Any popular forex robot will be placing countless orders to the market at virtually the same time, which means that the pool of available liquidity for accepting these orders may be exhausted quite quickly, leaving your orders out in the cold if they are coming from a distant server. Using an extremely low latency forex VPS service gives you the best possible chance of front-running the wave of orders.
As always, do your own research when selecting a VPS. Some suggestions to start with are the following service providers, who have been around long enough to have gained reputations as being reputable, reliable and offering good to excellent service:
Ultra Hosting
As implied above perhaps the best use for a VPS service is for the trader who has decided to run one or several automated forex trading systems – robots. If you want to explore this topic further click to go to Forex Robots