The Best Forex Hosting: Who’s The Best For Your Site? [Updated: 2021]

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by Adam Michael Wood

Last updated: October 22, 2019

Compare Forex (FX) Hosting

Forex (FX) trading – the trading of currency pairs in the foreign exchange market – is complex and occurs at lightning speeds. Milliseconds matter. That’s why many traders use a specialized web host for their trading software, rather than running it from their desktop.

Look for a web host with high speed servers, high bandwidth, advanced security, and a 100% network and uptime guarantee. Find out what the latency measures are between the web host’s servers and FX trading servers. These should be in the double-digit milliseconds at most.

Here are our experts’ top picks for Forex hosting:

1. Liquid Web – Managed VPS with SSDs, advanced security, 100% network and uptime SLA
2. Fozzy
3. TMD Hosting

How Did We Choose the Best Forex Hosts?

We shortlisted web hosts with the most performant infrastructure and fast server response times. Then we analyzed datacenter locations and CDN nodes, uptime history and policy, security technologies, and 24/7 in-house technical support.

Next, we cross-referenced our findings with thousands of user reviews from our proprietary database.

Forex Introduction

Forex, or Foreign Exchange Trading, is a booming, multi-billion dollar market, involving players at every level from gigantic, multi-national banks to lone-wolf traders. Individuals involved in the currency trade usually rely on complex Forex Trading software, which helps them connect to currency markets and execute trades efficiently. Rather than running this software on their local machines, they usually use Forex Hosting, specialized web hosting plans that provide the unique features they need.

What Is Forex?

Forex is the common term for the Foreign Exchange Market, the global trade in currency. The scale of the global trade in currencies is a little hard to measure, but it easily exceeds $5 trillion per day, dwarfing trade volumes in other asset classes like equities (stocks) or futures.

The Forex market is decentralized — there is no single official clearing-house for currency trades. Rather, major global market centers such as London, New York, Tokyo, Zurich, Hong Kong, and Singapore acts as anchors for Foreign Exchange trade activity.

Who Trades on the Forex Market — and Why?

A lot of people and institutions are involved in the Forex trade, all with different motivations.

• The foundation of the Forex trade is the interbank market, very large (multi-million and multi-billion dollar) trades between a handful of very large financial institutions (mostly banks and some insurance companies). Some of this activity is directly profit-seeking, that is — trying to make money on the “spread” of values between currencies, or the expected change in currency valuation. Much of it is in support of the activity of lower levels of currency trading. These transactions are not conducted publicly, so the details of their volume and the exact spread is not known outside the small circle of players. The interbank market accounts for about 35-40% of the Forex market.
• Smaller banks, large multi-national corporations, hedge funds, and other institutional traders are involved for reasons of:
  • risk hedging — spreading out the risk that any one currency will lose value
  • business needs — a company that primarily earns money in one country and spends money in another will need to exchange earned currency for spendable currency
  • profit-seeking — again, some traders are simply looking to make money through speculation or arbitrage

• National central banks participate in the Forex market primarily as political actors, attempting to stabilize currency value, effect a particular target interest or exchange rate, or to pursue other monetary policy goals.

• Brokers and market makers engage in Forex trading primarily to support the Forex activity (retail and speculative) of smaller-scale traders.

• Retail currency traders assist international travelers who need to have spendable currency in more than one country.

• Individual speculators (day traders) attempt to make money as exchange rates change, as well (less often) through arbitrage (exploiting the difference between exchange rates in two different markets). Arbitrage is seldom a profitable enterprise for small-scale traders because of the relative efficiency of the currency exchange market and the costs associated with trading.