After finding that it's relatively easy to get Zorro set up on Linux with Wine, I was wondering if anyone would like a way to subscribe to a hosted Zorro/MT4 server? It seems Zorro/MT4 uses ~0.6 CPU cores (Xeon E5 v3) and ~256MB of RAM. Since Zorro isn't particularly latency sensitive, server location doesn't matter much which could make it super affordable.

My own server seems to deal with 4 instances for $34 so I imagine it'd cost somewhere ~$10 per Zorro+MT4 pair. Given that BeeksVPS and ForexVPS etc. seem to start at ~$30 it could be worthwhile.

Any thoughts? Anyone else interested in something like this?

Hi Veratyr

I'm interested in finding out more. What exactly do you have in mind - sharing a subscription to a cheap VPS provider?

The exact hardware depends how many people are interested and how many instances we need. A "cheap" VPS handles ~6 instances for $34, for a cost per instance of ~$6. A dedicated server on the lower end should (haven't tested this) handle ~12 instances for $56, for a cost of ~$5. A slightly beefier server would handle ~18 for $66 for a cost of $4 per instance.

That's just cost so to include price of managing it, I'd probably put the price at 2x cost or add a setup fee or something.

The way it'd work is basically:
- Give me a URL to an MT4 installer for your broker.
- Give me a URL to your Zorro keyfile if you have one.
- If all the MT4 installers are the same (which they seem to be), you'll get a VNC URL + password when the setup is complete with your Zorro S license installed, Zorro running and hopefully the broker plugin preinstalled and active. Ideally I'd automate this.
- I'd point a HTTP server at your log folder, authenticated by your VNC password. That way you can see your status page whenever you want.

You'd end up with something like this in the end (this is my Z12 instance): http://i.imgur.com/8gwvb03.jpg

It's a lot of effort though so I'd probably only want to do it if a lot of people are interested and if a lot of people are interested, it'd probably be better to work with the staff to get it set up as a more official kind of thing mostly run by them.

You should keep in mind that you are essentially allowing other users to run arbitrary code on your hardware! And Wine is definitely NOT a Sandbox, so you'll have to make sure that people don't do stupid things they shouldn't do (like stealing other peoples key files) and that they don't run the CPU into the ground (like mining bitcoins).

At the very least you should familiarise yourself with the concept of chroot, you might want to also look into the concept of containers (CoreOS offers the rkt runtime which aims to be secure).

Your math on the numbers is nice, but keep in mind, unless you are doing this with a couple of buddies you know in person, you'll have to sink time and money into this or end up with stolen keyfiles and mined bitcoins that aren't yours.

Thanks for the concern. I'm well aware of the problems you mention. I was intending to sandbox users with Docker containers (hadn't really thought about rkt) to prevent the kinds of abuse you're concerned about. Docker comes with the handy benefit of making onboarding dead simple:



For example (though in practice I'd do this through the JSON API rather than the command line).