MetaTrader 5, a world-class trading platform, hardly needs an introduction. Developed by MetaQuotes and launched in 2010, the platform has taken the torch from its predecessor, MetaTrader 4, and has proven to be the most innovative trading software that is available to brokers and their traders. Both retail and professional clients prefer MetaTrader 5 for its clean interface, powerful automated trading, and much more. This is why the platform has received wide recognition – most recently, it has won Best Trading Platform at the 2022 Forex Traders Summit in Dubai, as well as Jordan Financial Expo’s Best Wealth Management Platform 2022.
A crucial part of the platform’s success, however, has been its drive to innovate – the software regularly receives updates, which provide access to new features as MetaQuotes seeks to develop the platform further and further. One of these developments has been the new MetaTrader 5 Access Server Hosting feature. In the article below, we have outlined how the feature works and why brokers and traders alike would consider using it.
MetaTrader 5 Access Server Hosting and how it works
In May 2022, MetaQuotes launched Access Server Hosting. The service is essentially MetaQuotes having acquired the ability to use a set of servers around the world, placed in carefully selected locations with high traffic. Brokers can purchase a subscription with MetaQuotes to access them instead of having to rely on their own infrastructure to provide their services worldwide. The servers MetaQuotes has procured are located in more traditional high-trading activity areas like London and New York. However, MetaQuotes has also procured servers in emergent markets like Nigeria, with Access Server Hosting having the infrastructure in Lagos and Sao Paolo. The service comes pre-packaged with the MetaTrader 5 platform and can be enabled by the broker as easily as opening the MetaTrader 5 Administrator and subscribing to it.
As for the infrastructure MetaQuotes has procured, it is quite powerful – the speeds of the servers reach up to 10 Gbps and they allocate both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. The security of the servers is also carefully considered – the brokers do not need to worry about client data being intercepted and leaked. This is because said data is encrypted and sent via access servers and only decoded at the trading servers.
With global access and high speeds, the Access Server Hosting service is a great addition to the MetaTrader 5 platform. Here are some reasons why the service will prove to be beneficial to brokers in particular:
Why Access Server Hosting is beneficial to brokers?
The biggest brokers out there are able to secure servers around the world and have multiple offices, with each of them dedicated to a certain market and using infrastructure from said country. For instance, a broker could have an office in Australia and one in Cyprus. Its clients from Cyprus would be able to trade on a server hosted somewhere in the EU and its Australian clients will be able to trade on a server hosted in the country.
However, smaller companies and ones that are just starting up might not be able to secure an office in Singapore and London, for instance. They are therefore forced into focusing on only one of these markets, as traders on the other side of the world would not want to trade with high latency, especially at peak market hours. While it is possible for these companies to rent a dedicated server in other countries, it is not particularly cost-effective for them to do so. This lack of access means their client base is severely limited, and the companies are not able to compete with the bigger brokers we mentioned.
The new MetaTrader 5 feature fixes this – it allows one of these smaller brokers to instantly be able to access the MetaQuotes server in Hong Kong and host their own trading servers there, which would then make it possible for them to offer their services in Singapore. Their Singaporean traders would be engaging in the markets with low latency and making the best of the conditions available to them. The subscription for the service is the only cost they would have to incur – MetaQuotes has pledged to maintain all operational costs and all possible costs for repairs in the case of a server outage. The MetaTrader 5 developer also offers access to a simple subscription model that does not come with confusing contracts – brokers can opt in and opt out of the service whenever they please.
Even the bigger Metatrader 5 brokers which we mentioned would have some use of the Access Server Hosting service – it is quite beneficial for them to reduce operational costs by being able to rely on MetaQuotes’ maintenance of the servers. For instance, if the broker hosts its own server in London, maintaining the infrastructure could prove to be quite pricey, as it would demand having an IT team available around the clock.
It could also help them move more efficiently towards offering their services on markets from all over Africa – the Lagos and Johannesburg servers are particularly suited to this task. Nigeria in particular, but also Kenya are new destinations for Forex brokers to recruit clients from. Both countries have a large and largely untapped market. Setting up there could otherwise prove challenging for brokers, which can now use the MetaQuotes Access Server Hosting to do so.
What’s more, brokers that are experiencing high traffic can make good use of the platform – if there is high trading activity and their own servers are starting to slow down, they could easily enable the service, with MetaQuotes claiming this can be done in 30 seconds. This would allow them to off-load some of the high activity and deploy additional trading servers at a moment’s notice to secure their clients’ trades.
All in all, there are a lot of reasons why brokers would make use of the service – from allowing smaller brokers better ways to access the markets to dealing with extreme traffic and enabling bigger companies to branch into new countries, the service is posed to be a gamechanger for brokers. Its adoption by them will also lead to some benefits for clients – we have outlined them below:
Access Server Hosting and traders
If you are a trader, the introduction of Access Server Hosting is great news for you. A service most brokers that provide access to MetaTrader 5 has is VPS hosting. This is a service that allows you to rent a virtual server and trade with lower latency on it. However, not all brokers have access to VPS, and it could be costly to make use of the service. With MetaTrader 5’s servers around the world, however, brokers could opt-in the service and allow you to make use of a VPS on a trading server allocated on the Access Server Hosting server. This could mean the price of VPS services going down and it could also mean more brokers offering them.
An obvious benefit to the new service is the ability of clients to have access to a wider variety of brokers – as mentioned, more companies will have access to more markets around the world. This would also mean trading conditions improving, as competition could drive spreads down. Cheaper accounts could also become available from the brokers, which now have lower operational costs, as their peers force them to drive their entry costs down.
Overall, the new MetaTrader 5 feature is quite exciting, both for brokers and their clients. We cannot wait to see how it will change the markets going forward!
