We spoke with Nick Esposito, founder of NYCServers, a forex VPS provider operating since 2012, about the evolution of retail algorithmic trading and what traders should consider when building their infrastructure.

Algorithmic trading has transformed from an institutional-only practice into something retail traders engage with daily. Expert Advisors, automated strategies, and trading bots are now standard tools for a growing segment of the forex trading community.

To understand how this shift is changing infrastructure demands, we sat down with Nick, who has spent over a decade providing VPS hosting solutions to forex traders through NYCServers.

FXNewsGroup: How has retail algorithmic trading changed over the years you’ve been in this business?

Nick: When we started in 2012, most retail traders were still trading manually. The traders who came to us for VPS hosting were a small subset — usually more technical people who had learned to code their own Expert Advisors or had purchased EAs and understood they needed reliable infrastructure to run them.

Now it’s completely different. Automated trading has become mainstream among retail forex traders. The platforms have made it easier, the educational resources are everywhere, and traders have seen that running strategies manually around the clock just isn’t practical. We see everyone from complete beginners setting up their first EA to sophisticated traders running multiple strategies across different brokers and timeframes.

FXNewsGroup: What’s driving that growth?

Nick: A few things. First, the platforms themselves have improved. MetaTrader 4 and 5 made algorithmic trading accessible without requiring traders to build everything from scratch. You can buy an EA, rent one, or use free ones shared in trading communities. cTrader has done similar things with its ecosystem.

Second, prop firms have had a massive impact. Traders going through prop firm challenges quickly realise that consistency matters. Running your strategy on a home computer where your internet might drop or your PC might restart for updates is a risk they can’t afford during an evaluation. That’s pushed a lot of traders toward professional infrastructure earlier in their journey than we would have seen years ago.

Third, there’s just more awareness. Traders talk to each other in Discord servers, forums, and social media. When someone has a bad experience — missed trades, slippage from poor connectivity — others hear about it and learn from it.

FXNewsGroup: Speaking of infrastructure issues, what are the most common mistakes you see traders make?

Nick: The biggest one is underestimating the importance of reliability. Traders will spend months developing or testing a strategy, then run it on their home laptop and wonder why results don’t match their backtests. Your strategy can only perform as well as the infrastructure supporting it.

Another common mistake is ignoring server location. Latency matters, and where your VPS is physically located relative to your broker’s servers makes a real difference. A trader using a broker with servers in New York but running their VPS in Singapore is adding unnecessary latency to every order. For some strategies, that won’t matter much. For others, especially anything that trades frequently or targets small moves, it can be the difference between profitability and not.

The third mistake is going too cheap on resources. Running one MT4 instance with a single EA is very different from running MT4 and MT5 simultaneously with multiple EAs, indicators, and analysis tools. Traders sometimes start with minimal specs, then wonder why their platform freezes during high-volatility news events when everything is working hardest.

FXNewsGroup: How much does latency actually matter for the average retail trader?

Nick: It depends entirely on the strategy. If you’re running a swing trading EA that enters a few positions per week and holds them for days, the difference between 5 milliseconds and 50 milliseconds probably won’t impact your results meaningfully.

But if you’re scalping, trading news events, or running any strategy that executes frequently and targets small price movements, latency absolutely matters. Every millisecond of delay is an opportunity for the price to move against you before your order fills.

The traders who benefit most from low-latency setups are those running high-frequency strategies, news trading algorithms, or any approach where precise entry and exit timing is critical to the edge. For them, being positioned close to their broker’s servers — ideally in the same data centre or nearby — is a real competitive advantage.

We have servers in New York, London, and Tokyo specifically because those are where major brokers cluster their infrastructure. A trader can check where their broker’s servers are located and choose a VPS in the closest location.

FXNewsGroup: You mentioned prop firms earlier. How has that industry affected your business?

Nick: Significantly. Prop firm traders have become a major segment of our customer base over the past few years. The funded trading model has brought a lot of new participants into algorithmic trading who might not have started otherwise.

What’s interesting about prop firm traders is that they often have stricter requirements than regular retail traders. They’re being evaluated on metrics like consistency, drawdown, and risk management. Any infrastructure issue that causes a missed trade or an unmanaged position during their challenge can mean failing the evaluation.

That pressure has made prop firm traders very infrastructure-conscious. They understand that passing a challenge isn’t just about having a good strategy — it’s about executing that strategy flawlessly over the evaluation period. A VPS running in a professional data centre with redundant power and network connectivity removes variables that could otherwise derail their results.

FXNewsGroup: What should traders look for when choosing a VPS provider?

Nick: First, server locations. Make sure they have presence close to your broker. If you trade with a broker whose servers are in London and your only VPS option is US-based, that’s not ideal.

Second, actual specifications versus marketed specifications. Some providers oversell their servers, meaning you might be sharing resources with many other users and not getting the performance you expect. Look for providers that are transparent about what you’re actually getting.

Third, support that understands trading. When something goes wrong at 3am during the Tokyo session, you want support staff who know what MetaTrader is and can help troubleshoot quickly. Generic hosting support that’s never heard of an Expert Advisor isn’t going to be much use when you’re trying to figure out why your EA stopped running.

Finally, uptime guarantees and track record. Ask how long they’ve been serving traders specifically. Trading VPS is a niche within a niche, and providers who have focused on it for years have usually worked out the issues that newer entrants are still figuring out.

FXNewsGroup: Where do you see retail algorithmic trading heading over the next few years?

Nick: More automation, more sophistication, and higher expectations for infrastructure.

The barrier to entry for algorithmic trading keeps dropping. AI tools are making it easier to develop and test strategies. No-code and low-code platforms are emerging that let traders build automated systems without programming knowledge. The pool of retail algorithmic traders is only going to grow.

At the same time, expectations are rising. Traders who started with basic setups are upgrading to more powerful configurations. They’re running more strategies, across more instruments, with more demanding resource requirements. The definition of “good enough” infrastructure keeps moving upward.

I also think we’ll see more integration between trading platforms and infrastructure providers. Smoother setup processes, better monitoring tools, tighter connections between the strategy development environment and the execution environment. The goal is reducing friction so traders can focus on their strategies rather than on managing servers.

For us, that means continuing to invest in server locations, network quality, and support capabilities. The traders we’ll be serving in five years will expect more than the traders we served five years ago. That’s the nature of the space, and we’re planning accordingly.

FXNewsGroup: Any final advice for traders considering moving to a VPS setup?

Nick: Start before you think you need it. Most traders come to us after they’ve already had a bad experience — a missed trade, an EA that stopped running overnight, a challenge that failed because their home internet dropped at the wrong moment.

The cost of professional hosting is minimal compared to the potential cost of infrastructure failures. If you’re running any kind of automated strategy with real money or pursuing a prop firm challenge, the peace of mind alone is worth it.

And do your research on server locations. That five minutes of checking where your broker’s servers are located and choosing a VPS accordingly can make a meaningful difference to your execution quality over time.

About Nick

Nick is the founder of NYCServers, a forex VPS provider he started in 2012 after recognizing the need for reliable, low-latency hosting tailored specifically for traders. Connect with him on LinkedIn.