Is a dedicated line better than cloud VPS for retail scalping?

[LondonScalper]

Dedicated line vs cloud VPS for retail scalping

I have tried both: a home fibre “gaming” setup and a cheap cloud VPS near the broker’s matching engine city. The honest answer for discretionary M1 work: location and stability usually beat raw download speed at home, but a bad VPS is worse than a clean local connection.

What I measure:

• Ping / route consistency to the broker endpoint (not speedtest to random CDN)
• Platform freeze count during London open
• Fill quality on the same pair/session for two weeks each path
• Cost of the VPS vs any improvement in median slip

Dedicated lines sound serious; for most retail size the bottleneck is often broker path and your own click discipline, not the last mile. Still, if you are co-locating mentally with “every millisecond,” prove it with a log — do not buy infrastructure on folklore.

What have you measured that actually changed your setup?

[PropScalpDesk]

For discretionary work there's a catch with the VPS option. The terminal on the VPS is close to the broker, but you're clicking through remote desktop from home, so every chart update and every click travels over the same home connection anyway, plus the RDP compression delay. For manual scalping I've found that setup often feels slower than a local terminal on decent fibre, even though the order path from the VPS is technically shorter.

A VPS clearly earns its fee for EAs, trade managers and anything that has to keep running if the home line drops. For manual entries, the measurement I'd trust is your third one: fills on the same pair and session over two weeks each way.