Chris Johnson

Three separate latencies sit between a futures platform and a matching engine, and only one of them is a hosting decision. This guide separates them, then gives the figures we measured from our own Chicago facility to the broker gateways a NinjaTrader or Tradovate setup actually connects to: 0.2 ms to Rithmic's market-data gateway, under 1 ms to its order gateway, about 3 ms to CQG's. The question that follows is not really "VPS or dedicated". Both sit in the same city and cover the same distance, so neither is closer to anything. What changes is who else is scheduling the CPU while your strategy is trying to finish a calculation, which is a question about load, not about milliseconds on a map.

AlmaLinux gives you the RHEL platform (same ABI, same ten-year lifecycle, same ecosystem) for free. Red Hat charges four figures a year per server for the real thing. The interesting question isn't which is cheaper; it's what, precisely, the subscription buys and who actually needs those things. This guide itemises the answer: support SLAs, ISV certifications, live patching and lifecycle add-ons on one side; Alma's genuine independence perks (including drivers Red Hat dropped) on the other, plus the free 16-system Red Hat option most people forget exists.

Almost every Proxmox-vs-ESXi comparison is written for a homelab or by a backup vendor. This one is written for the person renting a dedicated server or running a small hosting fleet, where the constraints are IPMI-only recovery, single-tenant hardware, no SAN, and network configured at the host. It covers what the Broadcom licensing shift actually changed, what the reintroduced free ESXi can and cannot do, the bare-metal architecture differences that matter, the multi-node failure modes that bite in production (and their fixes), honest per-node cost math, and where ESXi still wins.