Topic: Platform / hosting / connectivity choices

I think it depends a lot on your strategies; trading based / in running bots would probably benefit from being on a server closer to betfair, especially if your home ping times are as bad as mine. My own methods are not particularly time sensitive, so I run from home.
I don't think better uptime alone would justify hosting, basic packages are cheap but if you want control of your environment, good service, a London-based centre and guaranteed uptime that still costs.
I think a backup running on a mates system might be an idea - the only significant (> 2 hr) downtime I've had in two years was a local exchange problem, so another line to my house, even with a different provider, wouldn't have helped. I thought about that when you mentioned it, pretty sure my brother would be OK with the idea, but I know I'll never get round to it.
To be honest, Network downtime so far (> 1 yr) hasn't been a problem. (Betfair downtime is a different matter!). If it became a problem, I would think about other solutions but until then....

S'funny you should be talking about this. I run everything on my home PC i.e. I don't use a hosted service. Never had any problems with reliability - apart from this evening. I left my bot running while I went to mow the lawn (it was like a meadow out there!). Because of all the rain yesterday, my (electric) mower got snarled up with wet grass and shorted my house out - whilst my bot had some exposure to recover...D'oh!

Luckily I was just testing with small stakes, so I only lost £10, but it's made me think about a hosted service! (Or a petrol mower...)

My home DSL has a better uptime than betfair. I use my 3G mobile as a back up. (I am surprised how good the betfair uptime is, considering the amount of traffic, the peaks in traffic and the potential for DoS attacks.)

I use a debian/ubuntu python/ZSL setup. I already have a number of machine running at home, (mythtv, webserver, software-automatic-testing-box). So I might as well make the best use of my terrible electricity bill. The aim is one day to migrate some of the mess I run at home to amazon EC2 (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2).

My 2p worth,
Brendan

I run debian LAMP servers for my PHP bots.

Even getting dedicated servers in a data centre does not get you perfect reliability. I'm currently renting 2 self-managed dedicated servers from different providers. I had to get a second one because the first one was badly affected by poor network connectivity to betfair, fixing it was out of the host's control, I paid 3 months in advance and naturally there's no refunds :( The second server is in a different location but that has had a recent increase in network latency too. I'm considering returning to much cheaper VPS as my bandwidth requirement is much lower since data charges restricted me and also because I've lost my betting mojo at the moment too ;p

Hope the mojo returns soon Fred!

Amazon EC2 looks really interesting - especially the pay-for-what-you-use aspect.

I'm coming to virtualisation a bit late I think - just starting to use it at work now - the possibilities are amazing!

Thanks peteb. I was just having a look at Amazon EC2, I couldn't tell if they had any non-US presence, which is important in order to login at betfair.

I've not tried playing with virtualisation myself, I've only used the end product. I didn't like the lack of security when I used VPS - although I don't earn much from my activities my paranoia still doesn't want anybody to nick my stuff and I don't like admins poking around my private setups.