The sneaker flipping community has been around for years but as of recently there has been a surge in demand for dedicated “sneaker servers and proxies” that assist users in purchasing these limited goods. These sneaker servers host automation software provisioned to auto-purchasing limited shoe supplies off major footwear sites. This tutorial will serve as a guide to any passionate “sneakerhead” or anyone interested in hosting a low latency server.
Note: This is a guide for creating servers that can run large amount of tasks at high speeds. Follow other sources for the creation/purchasing of auto-purchasing software (bots).
Creating the Sneaker Server EC2 Instance
- Log onto your AWS Console and launch a new EC2 instance.
- For the sake of compatibility with most popular auto-purchasing software, select Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Base.
- Most automation software need dedicated storage and processing power to run tasks at low latency. The most optimal options are to run instance types of m5ad.xlarge and above. For demonstration purposes, select m5ad.large.
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Configure preferential VPC and Subnet setting. This section is important as it’s necessary to gather information on the location of data centers of the desired footwear sites. Select a region and area zone with the same proximity of the data center to minimize latency (closer it is the faster it becomes). For example, if a website is being hosted in California then select “us-west-1” or another nearby region. Once selected, “launch” the instance.
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Connect to your instance by selecting Connect and navigating to the RDP client. Upload the unique key pair used upon creation and generate the password necessary to access the instance. Note Mac needs Parallels or other RDP client software to access the instance but Windows can handle it just fine.
- Once the instance is accessed, navigate to Server Manager and disable Windows Defender. This is partly due to some software not properly functioning during task creation.
- Optional: Disable IE Enhanced Security Configuration if your desired web browser isn’t Internet Explorer.
- Install all automation software. Check speeds.