R4CopierR4Copier reads your master and writes to every slave from the same machine. Master to slave is a hand-off between two local processes — the order never travels to a vendor’s servers and back before it reaches your broker.
This is the whole argument, and it takes about a paragraph.
When a cloud copier fires, the sequence is: your master terminal fills, the vendor’s server is notified across the internet, it decides what to send, it opens a connection to your slave account’s broker, and the order lands. Two internet legs added to a path that needed neither of them, plus whatever queueing the vendor’s infrastructure adds under load — which is highest at exactly the moment you care most, when news moves and every customer fires at once.
When R4Copier fires, the sequence is: your master terminal fills, the engine on the same machine reads it, applies your lot rule and symbol mapping, and writes to the slave terminal’s bridge — also on that machine. The only network leg left is the one that was always there: the slave terminal talking to its own broker.
You are not making the internet faster. You are declining to add a detour to it.
A VPS in the same data centre as the broker bridge. This is the configuration prop traders should be running, and the numbers reflect it.
ForexVPS, Beeks and ContaboCloud all serve this well. Choose the region by where your broker’s servers are, not by where you live.
Perfectly workable for swing entries and for testing your rules before you commit capital. The variance, not the median, is what hurts on fast entries.
A residential route also fluctuates through the day in ways a data centre route does not.
Don’t take the range on faith — read your own. The Trade Monitor shows live latency for every slave individually, so the number you plan around is measured on your hardware against your brokers, not quoted off a marketing page.
It is easy to sell milliseconds and much harder to be useful about them. If you are copying a scalping strategy into a prop account during a news release, the gap between your master fill and your slave fill has several contributors, and the copier only owns one:
The reason to run a local copier is not that it makes these disappear. It is that it stops you adding an avoidable term to a sum you already cannot fully control.
Install your MT4, MT5 and cTrader terminals on the VPS as usual. R4Copier auto-detects them on first launch — masters and slaves alike, across platforms.
Lot sizing is a rule per slave — percentage of lot, percentage of equity, or a static volume — plus symbol prefix and suffix mapping for brokers that name pairs differently.
The terminal runs headless on the VPS. You watch it from the web dashboard on any device, which is the one part that is remote — and it only reads.
Because copying only happens while the machine is up, treat the host as infrastructure rather than as a computer you occasionally use. That is the trade-off self-hosting asks for, and it is covered in more detail on the self-hosted trade copier page.
One where the copying engine and the terminals it reads and writes are on the same machine. The order goes from master to slave as a hand-off between two local processes, not as a request to a remote service.
Running that machine in a data centre still counts. "Local" describes the distance between the copier and your terminals, not the distance between the copier and you.
On a VPS in the same data centre as the broker bridge, median master-to-slave latency is 42–60ms. On a home connection, expect 80–150ms depending on your route.
The Trade Monitor shows live latency per slave, so you are never guessing which number applies to your setup.
No, and be suspicious of any copier that says it will. Latency is one input to slippage; spread at the moment of execution, broker fill quality and the size you are pushing are the others, and none of them are under a copier’s control.
What a local copier removes is the portion you were adding unnecessarily — the round trip to a vendor’s cloud and back.
Partly. It removes the vendor hop, which is real, but each terminal still has to reach its own broker’s server and that distance is fixed by geography.
In that situation pick your VPS region for the account that matters most — usually the slaves, since that is where the fill you actually get is determined.
Yes. Install R4Copier on the Windows PC where your terminals already run and it copies between them on that machine, with no account for a hosting provider and no extra cost.
The catch is availability rather than capability: copying happens only while the PC is on and connected, so a machine that sleeps overnight or reboots for updates will miss trades. That is the whole argument for a VPS, and it is the only one.
Not in the sense of no internet at all — each terminal still needs its own connection to its broker, and no copier can place an order without one.
What it does not need is a connection to us. The copying itself is a local hand-off between processes on your machine, so an interruption to our servers stops your dashboard updating, not your trades copying.
Copying stops while the terminal is down, and resumes when it comes back up and reconnects. Trades opened on the master during the outage are not retroactively copied.
This is the operational cost of local copying and the main reason we recommend a VPS over a desktop for anything running against funded accounts.