Topic: Exchanges

Afraid not - I've only used BF so far. Although I did take the precaution of encapsulating all my Betfair-specific code in a generic Exchange class (with a view to being able to plug in replacement code for Betdaq fairly painlessly).

One rather nice thing I noticed in the Betdaq documentation is they have a Heartbeat feature. You can tell the exchange that if you stop sending regular 'Pulse' calls, all your unmatched bets should be suspended. So if you lose connectivity (because you're running your bot on a PC at home and your broadband's gone down, for example) your position won't change (until you reconnect and can start managing it again). BF could do with that.

Speaking of 'running your bot on a PC at home' does anyone NOT do that?

I've been thinking of getting some server space somewhere to run mine on rather than use my computer and potentially dodgy ISP's broadband. I'm at the stage where if my broadband were to play up (and it has done significantly in the past) I'd be very upset not to have my bots running...

Anyone know a good company you can rent server space from, but not just for simple hosting ... for running your own code on?

I've been thinking about this too, but haven't done anything about it yet.

I already have a Virtual Private Server (VPS) which I use for hosting websites, and am very happy with it, so my plan is to run my bot on that. My bandwidth allowance is only 500 GB per month, but I think that should be enough for a bot using the free API - if I've done my sums right it equates to about 200 kilobytes per second.

But to avoid stressing the VPS too much, I'm thinking I'll only run it as a backup i.e. still run my bot on my laptop at home, but have it update something on the VPS every [twenty] seconds to signal that it's still active and happy. Only if it failed to do that would the VPS copy of the bot activate itself, and start managing any open bets.

The other thing that needs a bit of thought is obfuscating the passwords which would have to be stored on the VPS. You could never make them impossible for a determined member of the hosting company's staff to uncover, but ideally I'd like the effort of finding them to be significantly more than the balance in my Betfair account.

I am planning to migrate my bots to Amazon EC2. I understand Fred used to pay for hosting. I think it is worth while.

It's times like these (betfair down) when I wish I'd got back to building another betdaq bot. But then again - without betfair as a price reference it probably wouldn't be much use LOL

Well, today I funded my betdaq account and pulled my old daqbot out of retirement. It's one of my smallest bots as it doesn't really do much (or rather because it doesn't have pages of commented-out code like my others haha). It actually had quite a good run (before losing) last year with a strategy I coded in about 5 minutes, unfortunately I'd edited the code since then and don't know which commented out bits are which. So its just turned into yet another random test.
I've just been looking through the betdaq documentation again, and I'm reminded that I don't understand most of it! Fortunately my bot fired up first go so I didn't have to try understand things all over again.

Regarding hosting, it's definitely worth paying for the reliability of being in a data centre, VPS can be very good, though if you're paranoid about security or a control freak you'll want self-managed dedicated hosting :p

So any recommendations of who to use for dedicated hosting?

Sorry, I don't have any company recommendations. With all hosts (I've been with a few over the years, for shared, VPS, and dedicated) you get let down at some point. That might have something to do with me always going for the budget end though !

I've been using http://www.synergyworks.co.uk/ for a while now. I have a virtual server that costs me almost 30 pounds a month. it is one of the fastests connections to betfair I have ever seen. I fired off 5 scripts one day on Betfair just to see how many requests I could get per second and I got a high of 55 requests per script. That was 275 requests in total per second. I never did try the performance test on the API, it was pure scraping. I calculated that should I run those 5 scripts now, I would be paying over 15,000 pounds a day to Betfair in charges :-)