zorro and vps

hi everyone, i've been lurking this forum for some time, and at the same time trying to study the zorro platform and some trading theory.

i'm giving serious consideration on going live with zorro, but i can't rely to my home internet connection to being always on, and so i was looking for some advice on what vps may be the best to use.

thank you

We're running all Zorros at home, so I can not give recommendations for a particular VPS. But any Windows server that you can rent for cheap should do, in Germany for instance with 1&1. This is low frequency trading, so high speed is not required.

Hi. Another newbie here. When you say "Windows server", do you mean any of 2003/2008/2012 (as opposed to XP/7/8)? Are there any differences in setup or operation on Windows Server? Also, will Zorro run on Linux under Wine or a Windows VM? Thanks.

Linux Wine: I'm not sure. I think this has been never tried.

Windows Server as well as XP should all work, however Server 2003 is pretty old and I would not recommend it.

Windows VM should work fine also. We only heard that Zorro does not run under the virtual desktop software "Dexpot".

Thanks jcl.

Please bear with me to clarify: Normally software has "system requirements" to be a "supported" installation, and I haven't found this yet for Zorro. I gather the developers are running Zorro on Windows 7/8 32/64, so these are known good platforms? All the other Windows (XP, Server 2008/R2, Server 2012, VM) should work but are not known good, correct? (Except Server 2003 due to age.) And Linux is even further out...

Thanks.

Zorro runs on Win 8, 7, Vista, XP, and Server 2008 and 2012. Older OS versions have not been tested, but should work also for Zorro - but they might have problems to with the broker API or with MT4. BTW you're right, we'll add a system requirement info on the Zorro page.

Thanks jcl!

Did anyone have any success getting zorro running on linux under wine? I found a free vps http://www.vps.me/ not very fast but might just be fast enough to run an instance of Zorro 0.6ghz 384mb RAM for testing.

The VPS needs not be fast, unless you do training runs and optimizations on the VPS. Amazon also offers 1 year free VPS, and I can confirm that several Zorro instances run fine on the minimum version of the Amazon EC2 VPS.

Same here, i can confirm, i've had 2 instances running for over 1 week 24/7 and with no problems.

I think it could manage 1 more instance, so all in all it's great.

You can even run backtest on the minimum version, and it seems ok. even though the spec isn't very high..

I must say that the VPS has been the perfect answer for running Zorro. I was nearly going to buy a new computer a month ago for running/demo testing Zorro live 24/7 so many thanks for refreshing my memory as this is the most efficient, reliable and useful way to run Zorro live imo.

There are tons of VPS cluster/cloud services available i think you can even hire 20GHZ with 100GB RAM, SSD etc even on an hourly basis from some special providers.

Interesting and very useful for sure.

Hey Dave, just wanted to let you know that I just tested Zorro on (a very old version 1.2.2 of) wine and it seems to run fine. I didn't test actual trading but I know others have reported MT4 works with wine as well.

One thing that's nifty about wine is that you can easily run multiple instances by creating separate wineprefix directories. Theoretically if you have a snappy or multicore machine, you can assign each instance to a different processing core to maximize your crunching.

I'm not sure about vps.me I poked around on their site and found a US contact phone # in Asheville, NC. That's near me, so I called them. The guy that answered had never heard of vps.me & said perhaps they are a reseller. I thought that it's very strange to list a phone # on your site and the answering party doesn't even know of your company.

I deleted the bookmark to them...