Where are Alpaca’s Data Center (or Centers) located?
stream.data.alpaca.markets resolves to 38.122.35.99, which seems to be at Cogent Communications data center in NYC.
api.alpaca.markets resolves to 35.221.23.121, which seems to be a Google LLC data center in Mountain View, CA.
Are these correct?
Are orders really routed from my location to CA to NYC? That would be a lot of unnecessary latency. Why not locate your order-taking servers with your quote feed servers in NYC, close to the exchanges?
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The Alpaca data servers are indeed in New York. The account servers are hosted by Google at their us-east4 data center North Virginia.
The data servers are colocated on the same premises as our Securities Information Processor (SIP) where Alpaca gets all market data. Locating on the same premises provides Alpaca with very low latency (typically less than 20ms) data along with having high reliability (not needing to go out onto the public networks). Data API calls and websocket connections are handled from there. This provides the low data latency to our users.
The account servers are located close to the market partners on the east coast. Orders can be routed to several different execution venues not all of which are in New York. The choice of this location was to optimize latency and reliability.
Did that answer your question?
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Thanks for that info. I’d like to put a server in a latency-minimizing spot.
If I want to colocate a server in the same data center as Alpaca’s data servers, which data center would that be? Is it this one?
If I want to colocate a server in the same data center as Alpaca’s account servers in Google’s us-east4 region in northern Virginia, what zone would that be? (options are: a, b, c, per Regions and zones | Compute Engine Documentation | Google Cloud)
What are the possible execution venues that orders can be routed to, and their locations?
Thanks!
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