So as discussed elsewhere I run a bot on each of two "micro spot instance" Win2008R2 virtual servers with Amazon in Dublin. Both machines have been running continuously (other than doing the occasional Windows Update) for about a year. Each is costing around $12/month.

I've had no issues with speed as Betfair also maintain a data centre near Dublin. I actually think the price updates are a little faster than if run locally here from Australia. Certainly for the UK races they are.

You need to understand what you're wanting to achieve first as there'll be some applications ( i.e. realtime trading) where the latency introduced via your RDP session to the server could cause you to miss trades. For data collection or set-and-forget bot transactions something like this is perfect. For my application I wanted to be able to have the bot running 24/7 and be able to access it from whereever I was in the world via an internet connection.

Shaun yes you can run pretty much anything on the Amazon virtual servers. In fact you have to maintain them completely including OS patches and security access etc. Amazon aren't interested in doing any of this for you.

I also use Amazon servers professionally and run many instances with them, some taking advantage of the scalability UB refers to. For example we run a multi-user application that upon reaching a certain server load will automatically start additional servers to meet that load, and then shut them down when the peak eases. All depends on how much you want to spend.

Like physical machines, virtual machines have the same issues with viruses, bad updates and file corruption etc. so can suffer the same downtime issues.

Happy to help out where I can.

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Pixie

"It's worth remembering that profit isn't profit until it's spent off the racecourse." -- Crash