VPS Contingency Planning

Does anybody here host an ATS program (MT4 or otherwise) at a VPS provider? if so may I ask a few questions,

1. How are you notified if their network goes down?
2. If their network goes down how do you access the box?
3. How do you know your ATS has not crashed?

I currently run mine from my house, which means I have to suffer the occasional internet failure, but on the upside it's easy to monitor, if a crash or error condition occurs it simply kicks off an audio alarm, this is crude but it works.

I would like to discuss the trade offs if possible with other people doing the same thing.

I have looked into these a few times but never pulled the trigger on using one. Most claim a very high up time percentage 99.9% is the normal number I see. What I did instead was add an additional internet source and used a load balancer to have both online all the time. While each one has gone down occasionally, I have yet to have both die at the same time. The load balancer will distribute traffic evenly between both connections when they are up, but only send it to the one that is working when one is down. This creates no lost time switching from one source to the other.

I know this didn't answer your question directly but I thought I might offer an alternative solution.

hi,

the perfect setup is and costs doesent matters:

-take a real isp not an asp provider! real isp have their own redundant network, asp providers are customers from real isps
- an real isp with offers vps with iscsi (redundant servers and iscsi storage)/ i never have seen an isp or asp

the big advantage is, you can use your notebook anywhere in the world!

medium perfect and medium cost setup is:

- a real isp, for redundant networks (yes i know one)
- a w2k3 vps, not redundant (yes i know one)
- your notebook as secondary backup terminal

Monitoring: a real isp have always an network management, like snmp, they must monitor network infrastructure and own servers and customer servers/vps too. ASP provider can only monitor their own infrastructure, but not the underlying isp infrastructure

How you can check out, who is an isp and owns his ip addresses and is not an sub isp(asp)?
Each real isp have his own Autonomous System Number and ip space, ip are delegated to the real isp customers
The isp registries:
US: www.arin.net
EU: www.ripe.net
Asia/Pacific: www.apnic.net
all other registries like south america are not important

all other solutions are bad if you play with real money! if demos you can try whatever the market offers

IX