In this post, I’ll walk you through why we need a VPS for forex auto trading, how to get a super high quality VPS for free. At the end of the post, there’s a video tutorial in case you have any problem following the instructions.
In forex trading, you can create bots that automatically execute the trades, e.g. create buy or sell orders for you. The cool thing about trading bots is that it’ll free up your time so that you can focus on other important tasks of your life such as traveling, spending more time with your family, visiting your long-time-no-see friends. It also frees you up from trading emotion. In trading, emotion is your worst enemy. Trading bots do not have emotion, they follow formula strictly. Also trading bots have very fast execution. They make decision and trade in the matter of milliseconds.
However, trading bots need continuous connectivity to the network. It needs to be up 24/7 so that you don’t have to. You can do that by letting your computer run 24/7 but it’s power consuming. It also harms your computer. Now and then, you can mess up with your computer and the bot has to stop running. Also, the network connection between your computer and the broker server might be not so great that makes your bots perform worse. What if the electricity is cut off? The list of problem goes on and on. That’s why you don’t want to use your computer to run a trading bot.
The solution for this problem is a virtual private server (VPS). A VPS is a machine that locates in a data center that has access to a fast, 24/7 network connection. It’s always up and ready so you don’t have to worry about problem that would have with your computer such as power supply, network connection.
On the other hand, a VPS costs you money. Good VPS provider like forexvps.net costs you at least $27.99 per month at this moment. That’s the cheapest option with only 1 CPU, 2GB RAM and 60GB storage. The good thing about this VPS is that it is placed very close to the broker servers. Unless you use scalping bot that every millisecond would count, you wouldn’t need that type of super fast execution.
If you look for cheap forex vps on google, you might see for example cheap-forex-vps.com. It costs you $3.73 per month at the lowest price. However, how can you trust these VPS providers? You’re gonna put your bots with real money on these VPS. What happens if they are not secured enough? You’re risking your hard earned money.
In this post, I’m gonna show you how to get very high quality VPS for completely FREE. The VPS has to meet these requirements
- Be able to run Windows
- From a trusted provider
- Fast network connection
- High availability. Your bot needs to be up 99.99% of the time
- Easy to setup
- completely FREE
That sounds impossible but here’s the solution: Microsoft Azure. Microsoft Azure is a cloud hosting similar to Amazon AWS and it is best for Windows. Indeed, Windows is Microsoft product. Amazon AWS, MS Azure and Google Cloud are the top 3 cloud hosting, so you can absolutely trust their quality. Microsoft Azure offer you a 12 months free for 25+ services, including a free virtual machine. A virtual machine is another name for a VPS. That’s what we are looking for.
However, that’s not trivial that you can get the virtual machine for free out of the box. So, don’t skip ahead but stick with me.
It offers 750 hours of free virtual machine (VM) type B1S, 64 GBx2 storage per month. Think of storage as your computer hard driver. That’s enough for us to run our bots. However, when you create a virtual machine that runs Windows on B1S type of VM, it requires 128GB of storage. Microsoft makes it non-trivial to change that. 128GB = 64GB x2 but they are not the same. 64GBx2 is free but 128 GB is not. It’ll cost you about $20 / month. Not cheap, hah? No worry. Here’s the trick.
First of all, you’ll need to create a free account at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/
It requires you to enter your credit card. But it won’t charge you a dime if you follow this instruction. Also, at the moment of this post, you are also given $200 credit to use in 1 month. If you make any mistake, you have 1 month to sort that out before that $200 credit is gone. In my case, it costed me about $20 before I realized what was actually free, what’s not. That $20 was subtracted to the $200 credit. Therefore, it didn’t cost me anything.
After you’ve done registration, go to Azure portal by signing into your account or using this link for faster https://portal.azure.com/#home
From there, follow these steps below. You can see the screenshots below or watch the video at the end of the post for more detail. Step 6, 8, 11 are the most important. They’re in bold.
- you create a virtual machine by clicking on ‘+Create a resource’
- Choose ‘Windows Server 2016 Data Center’ from the top of the list
- Under Resource group, choose ‘Create new’ and put any name that you want
- For Image, Choose ‘Browse all public and private images’
- Scroll down the list until you see the first ‘[smalldisk] Windows Server 2012 R2 Data Center’
- Choose the first ‘[smalldisk] Windows Server 2012 R2 Data Center’
- For Size, choose ‘Change size’
- From the Select a VM size dialog, choose ‘B1s’
- Under Administrator account, type in the username, password for the windows machine. You’ll need this one to login into the machine.
- Hit Next: Disks
- Under the disk tab, choose ‘Resize to 64 GiB (P6) Free account eligible’
- Hit “Review + Create”
After step 9, your screen should be similar to this
That’s all you need to do. I tried to list all the steps to make it clear. But it’s not necessary to do exactly the same. The UI interface might change when you read this as well. The fundamental part is that you’ll need to create a Windows virtual machine that runs on B1S type of virtual machine, and you’ll need to get it runs on only 64GB of storage. In order to do that, step 6, 8 and 11 are the 3 most important steps. You don’t want to go wrong on these steps.
Images that have [smalldisk] prefix allows you to use smaller storage size. Otherwise, it forces you to use 128GB storage and it’s not changeable. If you choose another image without the [smalldisk] prefix, you won’t be able to see the option to resize to 64GiB as in step 11.
In step 8, if you can’t change the VM size to B1S, chances are that you chose the wrong image. Notice that in step 6, there are duplicated image names. In my case, there were two ‘[smalldisk] Windows Server 2012 R2 Data Center’ but only the first one worked.
After creation of the virtual machine (VPS), you can use remote desktop to access it. That shouldn’t be a problem. If you encounter any problem, feel free to leave a comment below. I’ll probably create another post about how to access the VPS and set it up for trading bot. Below is the video that summary what we have covered so far. Good luck and happy earning!
