Running MT4 on a virtual host

I recently decided to move all my live and test MT4 clients to a virtual host in the US. I wanted better reliability and I'm also hoping that faster network access to the broker server will be beneficial. I was surprised at how easy it was - I paid out $30 for the first month to Commercial Network Services and got my live account up and running remotely in about two hours. The only problem I have had so far is getting a gmail reader dll to work. It feels strange to be able to switch off my laptop during the week after having it running almost continuously for two years.

This virtual host is a Windows 2003 Server x64 instance in a data centre somewhere in New York, with excellent backup and network connectivity. It shows up as a Windows Terminal Server shortcut on my laptop. When I double-clicked on this for the first time, I was greeted with a normal Windows login screen, and even the Start Windows sound when I logged in. You can elect to have everything translated back to your local environment such as disk drives and printers. Aside from rather choppy screen updates, in full screen mode it looks and feels much like a local machine. When I run Windows Explorer on the remote host I can see my local drives, and transfer files (rather slowly) between environments.

Commercial Network Services has data centres in a number of cities, and I chose New York because it had the fastest ping times from FXDD. Whereas in Australia my laptop reports 400 millisecond ping times (yes, that's 0.4 second) from FXDD, this virtual host is 30 milliseconds away. Hopefully this will reduce the number of requotes and invalid price errors. My most demanding EA from a processing and network point of view is a news trader, and I'll be tweaking it in demo over the next few weeks to try to take advantage of the faster network times.