The paper studies a technique to improve the utility and performance of an automated auction application where the auctioneer and bidders communicate through the Internet. The lack of quality-of-service guarantees from site to site can severely influence the results of an auction by affecting the seller's income rate, auction fairness, and overall protocol efficiency. By properly identifying and migrating auctioneers to suitable hosts on the network, it is shown that the expected seller's utility can be improved along with other metrics of interest. The paper proposes a scalable approach to conduct the host search on a large network by applying the Simulated Annealing metaheuristic in conjunction with network probing. A detailed simulation study assess the performance of the system and quantifies the benefits of the proposal. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.