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Thank you for your feedback, I really appreciate your observation
I perfectly understand your point, and that's exactly the purpose to create this post, because not every single low-cost VPS service have to necessarily give a bad experience.
For example I know 3 persons and 1 small company who are using PiVPS since 2019 with a cost of $9.99/month, running NT7 with a load of around 8 charts and 1-3 strategies Enabled at the same time and what that PiVPS plan includes is: 1vCPU and 1.8 GB RAM. Those users are using this service for only the more basic experience, to run NT7 and a couple strategies and done, but I would like to know the other recommendations, experience and feedback from others members here about other good alternatives.
For example, Contabo received an excellent feedback from a Pro in the NinjaTrader Forum, and that was a service I didn't know until yesterday when vsltradr talked about it here, and that's positive because it is an alternative that seems to be a serious one.
Yes TradingThomas, the idea with this thread is to collect feedback and references that could to those traders who maybe are starting with a low budget, or maybe to trade in Sim/Demo etc. and can't afford to pay a high-cost VPS.
About RouterHosting, I don’t have any feedback yet. If someone here know something please post it.
Thank you for the latency information TradingThomas, I'm curious about how you could measure the latency between the Contabo's data center and Chicago. Does it come in their website? Or are you already using a VPS from Contabo and could measure this?
Giving a quick view in the map I see St. Louis is geographically closer to Chicago than NY, and I mention this because I see some VPS services say to be located in NY, but I don't have any kind of reference about the network communication (data transfer speed, latency, stability) between Chicago-NY and Chicago-St._Louis. I could think it could be similar but no idea.
Thank you, I hadn't seen this section about the latency in the Contabo site.
Yes sure, in a situation with 2 services, one with 2ms vs other with 18ms and both services with similar quality-price, of course the 2ms is a much better alternative about the latency.
Btw, have you already found any good alternatives for the Contabo VPS in these days?
You need to do your homework. Google makes it easier these days.
Google the name of the service and "... reviews"
I often look at Trustpilot https://www.trustpilot.com/review/support.routerhosting.com
There are other review sites as well. You need to decide for yourself what is credible and what is not.
This is excellent advice, thank you. RouterHosting, CheapWindowsVPS, and PiVPS all get terrible reviews on Trustpilot, while Contabo gets tons of rave reviews.
I would therefore take Contabo's 18ms over RouterHosting's 2ms any day of the week.
You need to figure out first why you need a VPS for trading, and then honestly- your VPS should adapt to your trading- not the other way around. So if you are running efficient algo’s on an efficient platform which you have tweaked yourself, and you know how to optimize your server to suit your needs- then you will already know exactly what hardware you need- and the price is what it is.
I started using VPS not for routing efficiency, but so I could access my trading station from multiple locations. Very few people on the retail side will benefit by having a system refreshing price and placing an order in a difference of a few or even dozen milliseconds. Especially if you are discretionary.
As a side note- you mentioned you are worried about your server crashing or not responding etc… Well then you would need server monitoring that will alert you the instant this happens if it does- which is an extra cost. Also, depending on what you are doing and the kind of data your are accumulating etc- you need to consider a backup solution, or some sort of roll-back/snapshot. You don’t want setup/optimization time, and gathered datasets to disappear. But now this is going further than the original scope of your question.
Just remember, it is not always the case- but often- you get what you pay for. If something seems much cheaper than any other competitor- something has to give. People don’t give away money, hosts have costs behind quality service, hardware, backbones.
Actually I’m looking for information about a Windows VPS service with a good balance between the price and the quality it offers in a range of prices of $7-$12 /month, to run NinjaTrader with a couple Algos. You can follow the thread opened here in the next link, and for now an option for a good VPS seems to be Contabo, and I want to give thanks to the user @vsltradr for the references about of this VPS service.
Im starting to do a search for US location Windows VPS services with the best price-reliability ratio, to run NinjaTrader 8 and/or NinjaTrader 7, maybe both at the same time but depending about if the RAM size allows to run these 2 …
The more basic Contabo Windows VPS setup cost $14.73 that is in the edge my current budget, and now I have a good VPS option I’m wondering how to have a way of having updated backups of everything, maybe periodic automated backups that are automatically uploaded to a cloud. And this would be just in case for example in the future you want/need to move that VPS “Windows workspace” to a local machine, or a local virtual machine, or to migrate to another VPS service. The idea is to have the way to move everything in the VPS in minutes, not having to start over and for example if it is to work in a fresh Windows installation then being installing NinjaTrader, then to see if Ninja want to import and recover the NinjaTrader-backup file, then having to configure the Algos, and making many small adjustments that are time-consuming, to have everything as its previous state in the VPS.
I was thinking a way to do this could be using a virtual machine (VMware or other…) and in that way everything could be moved from a local PC to a VPS and vice versa in short time. With a solution like this the whole process could take 15-30 minutes or so (moving the virtual machine files and restoring them in the end point), and the most important part: without to worry about to touch anything inside the Windows or Ninja that is a key point. But I see the VPS services don’t allow nested virtualization, it seems it wouldn’t work or if it works it could have performance problems (never tested, so I’m not sure).
I know VPS services has backup solutions but I’m starting and for the moment I need to keep expenses as low as possible, and the most important detail here is I don’t only want to have a backup that can be used into another VPS of the same company, no, I need a kind of universal Windows solution to have the way to move the ninja installation as its exact current status with all the configurations etc. being able to move it to whatever other Windows.
Please note in this case I see in Contabo VPS would be in Windows Server 2016, but the local PC and the local machine would be in Windows 10 (maybe in Windows 11 in the next year 2022).
Please members comment about your experiences, feedback and solutions for this situations about the backup for VPS, because it is the first time I will use a VPS and I would like to know how other more experienced traders handle this kind of situations, because yes, if a VPS keeps running for 2 years without problems, then of course some persons never won’t be worried about this kind of details, but I think is important to have a contingency plan even before to start, to know what to do and be covered just in case you need a quick move from a VPS to any other place.
If I read your post correctly, and I'm sorry I did speed read. You just want to keep you ninja the same so you can have it ready to go on your PC if need be?
2 things come to mind. I don't use ninja but most professional charting packages have a backup option. Copy those files to the cloud. You can add drop box etc to the vps.
Second there are some cloud backup services. Some even offer a nice trial period. Use that service to back up the vps and then restore on your personal PC.
Just some ideas brother. Hope I could help in some aspect.