Trading Technologies, TT, provides a drag-and-drop DIY algo development tool, ADL, and our servers are colocated. You may read more about the TT platform here: https://www.tradingtechnologies.com/trading/tt-platform/ You may also click the "Start A Free 30-Day Trial" button in the upper right to try the platform yourself. The trial comes with 30 days of live CME data and you can trade against our matching engine in simulation.
I am an intraday (index)futures trader. I am not a scalper per-se, although on any given day, I do many scalp trades, some planned as such, others not. I am not an HFT trader. Further, I do not now, or ever have, held an account with IB. Some time has passed since I've evaluated IB as well. The following points will either be valid, or the IB-folk here will help update my information. 1) IB uses a snapshot data feed. It is not tick-by-tick. For HFT and/or scalping this is not optimal. IMO not even acceptable for that type of futures trading. 2) For futures, IB commissions are not impressive, bordering on expensive in the current futures marketplace. IB's depth of futures products however may reduce the size of that marketplace dependent on which instruments you intend to trade. For futures on US indexes, including ES, IB is not a low-cost leader, IMO. 3) For intraday scalping, IB intraday margins and the time-in-force policy may be considered conservative. Within the marketplace other intraday margin policies are available which may or may not have an effect on your daily trading, or your abilities to execute a specific trading plan. As I said earlier, the points are either valid and true, or I will be schooled on what has changed or been updated. Trade On!
Sorry, I just read this. We have offices in NY and Chicago. We don't offer our own hosting for futures. Yes, having your server or PC running in Chicago would make sense. You can remote to that, to trade from Canada.