A dedicated server in Chicago sits on the long-haul fiber routes that cross North America. Our downtown facility is in the South Loop, near the exchanges, with dark fiber into Digital Realty’s 350 East Cermak, the metro’s primary carrier hotel, where we pick up most of our local connectivity. Futures traders run here for the path to the CME-side gateways in Aurora and at 350 East Cermak; the measured figures are in the FAQ below.
Serve the whole US and Canada from one place: a short hop to New York, and well-connected to both coasts.
Workloads where this metro is the deciding factor.
Trading and market data
Measured 0.2 ms round trip to Rithmic’s Chicago market-data gateway and under 1 ms to its order gateway, over our own AS55285 network. Windows Server and Linux images for NinjaTrader, Tradovate and market-data workloads.
Continental game servers
One central US metro covers East and West Coast lobbies with balanced ping.
Kubernetes on bare metal
EPYC 9004 nodes with 2x 40 Gbps uplinks for clusters that outgrew the cloud.
In downtown Chicago’s South Loop, with dark fiber into Digital Realty’s 350 East Cermak. The exact server facility is shared with customers on request.
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. If your build is not in the catalogue, mount your own ISO over virtual media or netboot it with a custom iPXE configuration. The machine is unmanaged, so nothing on our side touches the OS after handover.
Yes. A private network is a layer 2 network between your own servers, and its VLAN can be extended from Chicago to our other datacenters, so web servers in Chicago and Dallas can sit on the same network, both serving visitors while they pass sessions and cached pages to each other off the public internet. You set it up from the cloud console or by API, and it costs nothing. Keep a database cluster’s nodes together in one datacenter, where they answer each other quickly.
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.
Canadian and 
Dutch
