Hosting the terminal on a Windows VPS for all-session uptime — what I run my own infrastructure on, what to pick, and how to set it up.
The terminal is built to run all session — recording your journal, watching your alerts, keeping the gamma book warm. If your trading machine sleeps, drops Wi-Fi, or doubles as the family computer, a hosted Windows machine gives you a desk that never closes: you connect over RDP from anywhere, and the terminal is exactly where you left it.
It also moves you closer to the data. The futures tape originates in Chicago; a machine in the same metro reads it with less of the public internet in between than your home connection ever will.
Sharpnel's own production infrastructure — the API, the data service, the gateways, the market-data ingest — runs on dedicated hardware from QuantVPS in Chicago. That is not a paid placement. It is where this business actually lives, and it has carried the whole stack through every session since the terminal went live.
Where Sharpnel runsThey specialise in trading workloads rather than general hosting, which is the part that matters here: Chicago metro, Windows images that come sized for an always-on charting desk, and machines built for platforms that hold a live book open all session. They have also written up this exact setup on their side.
| Location | Chicago — same metro as the CME matching engine |
| Code | SHARPNEL — 60% off your first month |
| Their write-up | A page for running Sharpnel specifically, with the plan specs side by side |
Disclosure, and it belongs here rather than in a footer: that is a partner link and code SHARPNEL is mine. If you sign up through it they pay me a commission, and the code takes 60% off your first month — so it costs you less than going direct, not more. I would be recommending them either way, because this is where Sharpnel itself runs, but you should know the arrangement before you click rather than after.
