Rome was not built in one day, which is very true to trading systems in development. Start with higher timeframe strategies and let your system mature... as you gain experience see if reducing the timeframes assist you with your PNL. Latency is not an issue if you trade beyond 1 min imo. Focus on developing a backtesting env that you can use to develop good profit making strategies. Latency should be the least of your concerns. This was the advice I got from a wise man a few years ago.
https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ is cheaper for vps not sure if they run windows server though. They are not as near to the exchange as www.speedytadingservers.com though.
Retail collocation is a sales ploy. It's like the difference between walking from New York to San Francisco vs riding a bike. Sure, a bike is faster but it makes no practical difference because almost everyone else is flying or driving. The PNL difference between 300 ms latency and 1 ms latency won't be measurable. There are semi-retail ways of getting down to 60-80 mics that would have a measurable impact. That's like crossing America in a Ferrari. At least you are beating all the other car drivers. Proximity hosting with a reliable exchange connection and power is worth doing.
IB have a gateway in Equinix NY4. Most exchanges, including cboe, are in this data center so cost is high. www.fcm360.com can offer a server in this datacenter for about $1k+$750 for cross connect, a month. If cost is an issue contactwww.speedytradingservers.com about $170-$210 a month for dedicated, $80 a month for vps but they are in another New Jersey data centre 2ms from IB. Alternatively you can get a 2u rack in IB connecticut for $2k a month, email ci [at] interactivebrokers.com for more info.
There are two reasons to colocate a server at a data center: performance and reliability From your description I doubt you'd be worried about performance (if you're developing the strategies based off manual trades, the slowest connection will be hundreds or thousands of times faster than a human) Reliability is important, without more detail about what kind of strategies you are pursuing, for your purposes you could use an AWS virtual machine (99.999% uptime) for less than a typical consumer high speed internet connection.
Have to find an FCM that allows you to run something like TT gateway and auto spreader and your code all on one server. Then you need to find someone who knows how to set up that configuration properly as it's not officially supported by TT. That's the speed I hear is achievable which is actually better than some DMA implementations.
How true. C9location and VPS are the most misunderstood concepts by the self proclaimed hobby algorithmic "trader" these days. Most who consider colocation have no working strategy yet they are willing to shell out hundreds if not thousands of dollars. No wonder clever data and system providers moved from selling cheap exchange connectivity via APIs to touting colocation, VPS, and stp ecn concepts.