Colocation 

Colocation is a deployment of physical hardware in the Axon Trade rackmounts in Equinix NY4, a primary datacenter utilized by major financial companies and stock exchanges. One of the most secure and efficient (in terms of performance and latency) ways to start trading crypto is by leveraging these Axon Trade routing servers at Equinix. 

You can send us your own hardware or rent something from our inventory. Axon Trade can offer 1U or 2U slots with both managed and unmanaged options. 

With a managed option the Axon Trade team will take care of your hardware (monitor, component replacement, backups etc), while unmanaged means that it has to be done by your engineers. 

From our experience, if you want to get the best possible performance – colocation is the only choice. With direct access to hardware and software, you can tune servers to outperform virtual instances offered by cloud providers. Of course, it all comes with a price and depends on your end goals. For example, a Honda is a great car to do pretty much everything – travel, commute to work, help your friend to move to another location but if you need to run a race – consider a Ferrari. 

Pros of dedicated managed hardware:

• Low network latency 
• High performance
• High security
• Full control over the hardware 

Cons:

• Cost of hardware
• Cost of hardware maintenance

Cross-connection

If your servers are already in Equinix, another great option is cross-connection. With minimal latency, you can communicate with Axon Trade’s servers to consume market data and route orders to major cryptocurrency exchanges in the US, Asia, and Europe. 

Axon Trade’s state-of-the-art network infrastructure based on high-performance Arista switches will deliver FIX messages in and out in no time! 

Pros

• Low network latency
• High security 
• Ability to reuse your own hardware

Cons

• More expensive than VPN or VPS

VPN

If network latency for you is not an issue, we can offer access to our services through encrypted VPN channels. It’s easy to configure and doesn’t necessarily require purchasing expensive hardware.

With this type of connection, clients are able to access the same resources as cross or direct connection but with a bit higher network latency caused by SSL/TLS encryption. 

This is an ideal set up during the development/integration phase followed by migration to more advanced (and fast) cross-connection or colocation methods. Nevertheless, VPN can still be used for a variety of applications that do not require low latency.

VPS

Virtual Private Server (or VPS for short) is a good alternative to the co-location option. Instead of physical servers, your code will be running inside a virtual machine. This is a perfect option when you just want to do a quick test of your ideas. 

Pros

• No long-term obligations
• Hardware knowledge is not required
• Easy to maintain (backup, restore, destroy)
• Less expensive

Cons

• Less tuning options
• Less performance

VPS deployment options are available through our partners such as UltraFX VPS.

Let us know if you would like to try our services with a no-cost, no-obligation trial period!