Tradeify made a decision in 2026 that most futures prop firms have avoided: it sells three different broker connections at the same account price and makes you choose at checkout. Tradovate, Rithmic, or WealthCharts. You pick one, and you cannot switch afterwards on that account.
That is genuinely unusual, and it matters more than it sounds. Your connection choice determines which platforms you can run, which order-entry routes are available, and what your day-to-day workflow looks like for the entire life of the account. It is a decision people make in thirty seconds at a checkout screen and then live with for months.
What it does not determine is where your VPS should be. All three of those connectivity providers run out of Chicago, alongside the CME matching engines in Aurora, Illinois. That part of the decision is settled before you start.
Here is how to think about both halves.
Tradeify at a Glance
- Type: Futures proprietary trading firm
- Broker connections: Tradovate, Rithmic, WealthCharts — selected at checkout, not switchable afterwards
- Platforms via Tradovate: Tradovate itself, NinjaTrader, TradingView order entry
- Platforms via Rithmic: NinjaTrader, Sierra Chart, Quantower, ATAS, Bookmap and the wider Rithmic ecosystem
- Select accounts: unified evaluation with a $1,500–$9,000 profit target and a 40% consistency rule, then a choice of Select Flex (no daily loss limit, 5-day milestone payouts) or Select Daily (daily loss limit, buffer system, daily payouts)
- Growth accounts: 1-day evaluation possible, fixed payout policy, daily loss limit during evaluation, 35% consistency on funded
- Lightning Funded: instant funding, no evaluation, progressive consistency at 20% / 25% / 30%, non-resettable
- Not supported: MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 — this is a futures firm
📊 Key Stat: Tradovate, Rithmic and WealthCharts all operate Chicago infrastructure connecting to the CME matching engines in Aurora, Illinois. A Chicago VPS sits at roughly 1ms from that infrastructure. New York is 6-8ms. London is 35-45ms. Whichever connection you picked at checkout, the datacenter answer is the same one.
Choosing Your Connection: What It Actually Changes
Because the choice is permanent per account, it is worth a minute of thought rather than a coin flip.
Tradovate gives you the broadest set of entry points. The same credentials work in the Tradovate platform, in NinjaTrader, and through TradingView’s broker integration. If you want to place orders from a TradingView chart, this is the connection that permits it.
Rithmic opens the widest platform ecosystem — Sierra Chart, Quantower, ATAS, Bookmap, MultiCharts, MotiveWave and a dozen more. If you have an existing workflow built around one of those, Rithmic is the connection that supports it.
WealthCharts is the newest of the three options and comes with its own charting environment.
The one caveat worth stating plainly applies to the TradingView route on a Tradovate connection. Order entry through TradingView can be slower than the native Tradovate platform during genuinely fast markets — the New York open being the obvious case — and TradingView’s display of your prop trailing drawdown can lag what Tradovate itself shows. That second point is the dangerous one. Looking at a stale drawdown figure while you are near your limit is how accounts die from a rule violation the trader did not know they had committed.
⚠️ Warning: Do not manage your Tradeify drawdown from TradingView. Use it for analysis if you like it, but keep the native platform open as the authoritative view of your account state. A VPS gives you the screen real estate and the resources to run both simultaneously — which is a genuinely good reason to size up a tier.
Where Tradeify’s Servers Live
Tradeify is a prop firm, not a broker. The execution plumbing belongs to whichever connectivity provider you chose, and all three are Chicago operations for the same reason: the CME is there.
Your platform (VPS) → Tradovate / Rithmic / WealthCharts gateway (Chicago) → CME (Aurora, IL) → backThe gateway-to-CME leg is already optimised — that is the connectivity provider’s job and they have done it. The only segment you control is the first hop. Running your platform from a laptop in Europe means every order crosses the Atlantic before it even reaches the gateway.
Our piece on why Chicago matters for futures traders covers the physics in full, and Rithmic vs CQG data feeds covers how connectivity providers differ on the market data side.
FXVPS Latency to Tradeify
FXVPS runs Chicago instances specifically for futures work. Round-trip latency from a Chicago instance to Chicago gateway infrastructure measures in low single-digit milliseconds — the traffic stays within the metro fabric rather than traversing the public backbone.
| Where your platform runs | Latency to Chicago gateways |
|---|---|
| FXVPS Chicago | ~1ms |
| FXVPS New York (Equinix NY4) | 6-8ms |
| FXVPS London (Equinix LD4) | 35-45ms |
| Home connection, US | 20-45ms, variable |
| Home connection, Europe | 90-130ms, variable |
The variance column is the one that ends evaluations. A home connection does not deliver 30ms consistently; it delivers 30ms most of the time and several hundred milliseconds when something else on the network wakes up. The ES does not pause during the 09:30 open while your buffer drains.
Why Tradeify Traders Specifically Need a VPS
Consistency Rules Require You to Be There, Repeatedly
Every Tradeify account type carries a consistency requirement — 40% on Select, 35% on funded Growth, and a progressive 20/25/30% on Lightning Funded. The mechanism is the same across all of them: you cannot bank your result on one enormous session. Profit has to be spread across days.
That structurally forces regular participation. And regular participation means being reliably online across many sessions rather than most of them. Each session lost to a router reboot or a Windows update is a session that could have contributed to the distribution the rule requires.
Lightning Funded Is Non-Resettable
This deserves its own line. Lightning Funded accounts have no evaluation and no reset. If you lose the account, it is gone — you buy a new one.
That changes the risk calculus on infrastructure completely. On a resettable evaluation, a connection failure during an adverse move is annoying and costs you a reset fee. On a non-resettable account, it costs you the account. A $29/month VPS against the cost of replacing a funded account is not a close comparison.
Daily Loss Limits Punish Disconnection
Select Daily and Growth accounts carry daily loss limits, and Growth applies one during the evaluation. If you are in a position and your connection drops, you cannot manage the trade — but the limit keeps applying. Disconnection during an adverse move is one of the most common ways futures prop accounts die, and it is entirely an infrastructure problem with an infrastructure solution.
Every Tradeify Platform Is a Windows Desktop Application
NinjaTrader, Sierra Chart, Quantower, ATAS, the Tradovate desktop build, WealthCharts — all Windows software. There is no mobile-first path and no serious browser fallback for real order management. A Windows machine has to be on, and it should be one that does not depend on your household power supply.
If you are on NinjaTrader specifically, our NinjaTrader 8 VPS setup guide covers the install and licensing.
🚀 Try FXVPS free for $1.99 — get 7 days on the Core VPS risk-free and run your Tradeify evaluation from Chicago. No long-term commitment, cancel anytime.
Recommended FXVPS Plan for Tradeify
Core Plan ($29/mo — 2GB RAM, 1 vCPU) covers a single lightweight platform on a single account — a DOM-focused workflow with minimal charting. Adequate for testing the setup and for the leanest configurations.
Pro Plan ($39/mo — 4GB RAM, 2 vCPUs) is the realistic recommendation for most Tradeify traders. NinjaTrader 8 is a .NET application with a real appetite for memory, the Tradovate web platform runs in a browser (which is heavier still), and running the native platform alongside TradingView — which you should, given the drawdown lag caveat — needs headroom for both.
Scaling Plan ($79/mo — 8GB RAM, 4 vCPUs) is for traders running multiple Tradeify accounts across account types, or using order-flow tools like Bookmap and ATAS. Those process every tick and will consume everything you give them.
💡 Tip: Tradeify traders frequently run more than one account — a Select and a Lightning Funded, or two Select accounts on different instruments. Each account means another platform instance. Count your accounts, multiply by the memory footprint of your platform, and size from that rather than from the marketing minimum.
Setting Up Tradeify on Your FXVPS
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Choose Chicago at signup. All three connectivity options are Chicago operations. This is settled regardless of what you picked at checkout.
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Connect over RDP with the credentials FXVPS issues. See the RDP access guide if this is your first VPS.
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Confirm which connection your account uses before installing anything. Tradovate, Rithmic and WealthCharts have different credentials and different platform paths, and you cannot switch afterwards. Installing the wrong stack wastes an evening.
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Install your platform. NinjaTrader 8 works with either Tradovate or Rithmic; Sierra Chart, Quantower and ATAS are Rithmic-side; the Tradovate desktop application is the lighter alternative to the Tradovate browser platform.
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Connect and verify data is live. Green indicators, a moving DOM, a ticking chart. A platform that launches is not a platform that is connected.
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Sync the VPS clock. Futures sessions are defined in exchange time, and clock drift misaligns session boundaries on charts and in session-based indicators. See the time synchronisation guide.
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Keep the native platform as your drawdown authority. If you also use TradingView, treat it as an analysis tool, not as the source of truth for how close you are to a limit.
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Save your workspaces explicitly so a restart restores your layout. Configure the platform to auto-start, while accepting that credential entry is typically still required on connect.
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Disconnect, do not sign out. Closing the RDP window leaves your platform running. Signing out terminates it. See how to properly disconnect.
✅ Best Practice: Before starting a Lightning Funded account in particular — the non-resettable one — run your full setup on demo data for a week. Verify it survives a reboot, that your layouts persist, and that the connection holds overnight. The whole point of a non-resettable account is that you do not get a second attempt at the infrastructure.
Why FXVPS for Tradeify Traders
Tradeify’s structure produces a specific kind of trader: someone running one or more accounts under consistency rules that demand regular participation, on Windows platforms that need to stay open, through Chicago connectivity, with at least one account type where a bad day is permanent.
A Chicago FXVPS instance addresses all of that at once. Roughly a millisecond to the gateway, whichever of the three you selected. Dedicated CPU cores so your order-flow tools are not competing with a stranger’s workload at 09:30 Eastern. Datacenter uptime and redundant network so the failure mode that ends non-resettable accounts is one you have removed rather than one you are hoping to avoid.
Compare plans at /pricing/, or prove the latency yourself on a $1.99 seven-day trial before your next account purchase.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which VPS location should I use for Tradeify?
Chicago. All three of Tradeify’s connectivity options — Tradovate, Rithmic and WealthCharts — operate Chicago infrastructure adjacent to the CME matching engines in Aurora, Illinois.
Does the connection I choose at checkout affect my VPS choice?
No. It affects which platforms you can run and what your workflow looks like, but all three providers are Chicago-based, so the datacenter answer is identical. Choose the connection based on the platform you want to use.
Can I switch from Tradovate to Rithmic later?
Not on the same account. Tradeify sells the connection at checkout and it is fixed for that account. Choose deliberately — check that your preferred platform supports the connection before you buy.
Can I use MetaTrader with Tradeify?
No. Tradeify is a futures firm on futures connectivity. MT4 and MT5 are not part of that ecosystem.
Should I use TradingView for order entry on Tradeify?
With caution. It works on a Tradovate connection, but order entry can be slower than the native platform during fast markets, and TradingView’s view of your prop trailing drawdown can lag the platform’s. Keep the native platform open as your authoritative account view.
How much RAM do I need?
4GB is the realistic recommendation. NinjaTrader 8 and browser-based platforms are both memory-hungry, and Tradeify traders commonly run more than one account. 2GB works only for a single stripped-down setup.
Related Reading
- Best VPS for Tradovate — the platform side in detail
- Why Chicago Matters for Futures Traders — the latency argument in full
- Rithmic vs CQG Futures Data Feeds on a VPS — how connectivity providers differ
- Best VPS for MyFundedFutures — a comparable futures evaluation firm
- NinjaTrader 8 VPS Setup Guide — install, licensing and configuration