Hey,

I've been checking options for VPS server for forex trading and it seems that the best solution available at the moment is Amazon EC2. For those who does not know about Amazon EC2, these are cloud based servers that act similarly to VPS servers, but you pay only for real usage. Amazon EC2 has also windows instances with pricing starting from $0.03/h (approximately $22 per month). I checked many VPS offers and it's hard to find cheaper ones, especially if you want to be able to suspend the machine for some time or really quickly start a new instance (it takes only a couple of minutes on amazon). Micro instance is not the most performant one, but for trading purposes it's really ok, it has more than 600mb of ram and CPU power equivalent to ~1GHz.

Considering that the only VPS that I found and was cheaper than $20, was a total mess without any support, this is something really cool. And if I don't like it I can stop the instance and stop paying with one click

Here is a screenshot from Remote Desktop session with strategy trader playing with one of the strategies that I found on forum on oanda's demo account: https://skitch.com/drogus/8dfb3/windows-ec2

Here is a nice guide on how to setup EC2 and connect to it: http://blogs.iis.net/bills/archive/2009/01/13/how-to-run-windows-amp-iis-in-the-cloud-on-amazon-ec2-in-15-mins.aspx (you can skip everything after 29th step and just start installing what you need).

UPDATE:

Just a quick follow up. I'm actually running 3 instances of MetaTrader and FST to test 3 different strategies on demo accounts and it still works great. When I have more time I can try to check how much CPU & memory it uses to determine if more instances can be run simultaneously.