Has anybody used Amazon's web services for hosting trading apps? I'm looking to close down my data center and move everything I run over to Amazon, including to my ATS servers, hoping to save some costs.

Any experiences/thoughts?

shodson 

Has anybody used Amazon's web services for hosting trading apps? I'm looking to close down my data center and move everything I run over to Amazon, including to my ATS servers, hoping to save some costs. Any experiences/thoughts?

You will not asave. If you run base load yo uare bettter of sith a vps provider hat can provide virtual racks (i.e. your own private backend etc.). Amazon is really expernsive per hour compare dto "long term commitments". If you ahve significant peak load.... it is good (i.e. 10 machiens for 2 hours end of the week).

I agree with @NetTecture, I haven't heard good comments on EC2.
Rackspace.com is a bit cheaper, but that's also not so great.

I’ve used AWS (Amazon Web Services) for mounting NT and OpenQuant on servers for conducting backtests, optimisation and walk-forward analysis.

I’ve found it very good. It is good from the perspective that you only rent space / processing power. There is no capital outlay. There are some tricks to it (e.g. setting up FTP services to get your database onto the server), but once you handle those you are good to go; use the server for a couple of days then store the volumes on their storage facility. I pay a monthly fee for the space I use while the server is not active.

@shodson asks about trading, which he is referring to setting up a server as a host for a trading platform to trade live against the market.

I did the numbers on using AWS as a host for this; I remember thinking it wasn’t cheap for a long term hosting. And I would ask if it wasn’t cheaper to buy a secondhand server from Ebay and have your local ISP put it in their data centre for you?

I wondering does anyone have any hosting agreements with their broker? I.e. that there broker gives them server space upon which to host a trading platform. That might also be an option depending on how might money you are throwing around they might be obliging.

For further reading on this you might want to see Ernie Chan’s blog: Quantitative Trading: Fios and EC2

Cheers,

drolles