Dedicated servers in Chicago

Chicago is roughly equidistant from both coasts: a short hop to New York and Dallas, and well-connected to Los Angeles and Seattle.

Two. Servers sit in our downtown South Loop facility, and a second network presence at Digital Realty’s 350 East Cermak, the metro’s primary carrier hotel, is reached over dark fiber and carries most of our local connectivity. Traffic therefore has more than one way out of the city. The server facility is shared with customers on request.

Our public looking glass runs ping, traceroute and BGP lookups from the Chicago node against any address or hostname you enter, so you can measure the real path from where your users sit rather than take our word for it. Results can be copied or downloaded, and recent tests stay in the panel so you can compare one location against another.

CME Group’s matching engine sits in its Aurora, Illinois data centre, west of the city, and the brokers’ gateways sit there and at 350 East Cermak downtown. We measured the gateways a NinjaTrader or Tradovate setup actually connects to, from our Chicago facility on 14 September 2026, 100 samples each, no loss: 0.2 ms round trip to Rithmic’s market-data gateway, under 1 ms to Rithmic’s order gateway, and about 3 ms to the CQG gateway that Continuum and Tradovate orders route through. Those are path measurements across our AS55285 network, not a cross-connect or a co-location cage: your server is a dedicated machine in the South Loop, not a rack inside the exchange. The looking glass runs the same ping from the Chicago node against any address you enter, so you can repeat the test against your own broker gateway before ordering.

Yes. NinjaTrader installs on the Windows Server one-click image and Tradovate runs in a browser or through NinjaTrader’s connection. The machine is single-tenant, so chart rendering and strategy execution are not sharing a CPU with anyone else’s workload; for NinjaTrader’s per-chart threads the AMD Ryzen configurations, which trade core count for clock speed, are the usual pick. Serverside.com is not affiliated with NinjaTrader Group.

Chicago carries our full range, from entry Xeon E3 machines through dual Xeon Gold and AMD Ryzen to EPYC 9004-series with 2x 40 Gbps uplinks.

Stock configurations are live with a root shell in under a minute. Custom builds are quoted individually.

Hourly, monthly, quarterly, semi-annual and annual cycles all run on the same hardware, so a week-long test and a machine you keep for years differ only in the term you pick. Quarterly takes 5% off, semi-annual 10% and annual 15%. The prices listed on this page are the monthly rate.

Anything you can boot. One-click images cover the mainstream Linux distributions, Windows Server and Proxmox VE, and cloud-init applies your first-boot configuration automatically. The machine is unmanaged, so nothing on our side touches the OS after handover.

Yes. Inline, always-on mitigation is included on every server at no extra charge.

The Chicago facility holds a SOC 2 Type 2 report and is HIPAA and PCI compliant.