Algorithmic crypto trading has a simple infrastructure dependency: the bot must be awake whenever the market is, and crypto markets never close. Home machines fail this on every axis — sleep, reboots, ISP hiccups, dynamic IPs that invalidate exchange allowlists at 3 a.m. A VPS is the standard answer, and a crypto-native VPS is the coherent one: you are running strategies denominated in BTC and stablecoins; paying for the infrastructure in crypto from a prepaid balance, with no identity file sitting next to your API keys, keeps the operational and financial surface in one universe. Freqtrade, Hummingbot, Jesse, Gekko forks, custom ccxt scripts, signal followers — they all deploy the same way on a root Debian box.
Honesty about latency, because bot marketing oversells it: if your edge is high-frequency market-making, you need colocation in the exchange’s own data centre, not any retail VPS. For everything else — trend systems, grid and DCA bots, arbitrage monitors, liquidation watchers — what matters is consistency: a stable sub-50 ms round-trip to the exchange API beats a jittery 5 ms you cannot hold. Major exchange matching engines cluster in Tokyo/Singapore (APAC) and Western Europe; our Kuala Lumpur region serves the first, Amsterdam and Paris the second, all on a 1 Gbps port.
The setup pattern that survives contact with production
On a hardened base (ten-minute pass): run each bot in Docker or a systemd service with Restart=always, so a crash is a blip rather than a flat position overnight. Keep exchange API keys withdrawal-disabled and IP-allowlisted to the VPS’s dedicated address — that combination converts a leaked key from catastrophe to nuisance, and it is only possible because the IP never changes. Log locally, alert remotely (Telegram webhooks are the de-facto standard), and back up strategy configs off-box; the included weekly snapshot covers the OS, not your edge. A clean IP matters more than people expect: exchange anti-abuse systems rate-limit by source reputation, and shared or burned addresses hit those walls first.
Sizing: bots are RAM-light until they aren’t
A single Freqtrade instance with a dozen pairs idles in a few hundred MB — a Cub ($5, 1 vCPU / 2 GB) runs it with room for the OS. The growth path is predictable: each additional bot or exchange connection adds a process plus websocket buffers; backtesting and hyperparameter optimisation are the real CPU hogs and love cores. Scout ($9, 2 vCPU / 4 GB) is the comfortable multi-bot default; Hunter ($19, 4 vCPU / 8 GB) when you optimise on-box or run Hummingbot market-making with order-book maintenance across venues. NVMe is quietly useful here too — candle databases and backtest reads stop being the slow part.
Jurisdiction, plainly
Running trading software you are authorised to run, against accounts that are yours, is lawful business everywhere we operate — the offshore properties are about privacy posture, not regulatory arbitrage. A no-KYC host means no identity dossier links your infrastructure to your strategies; Monero checkout means no card statement does either; and the jurisdiction menu lets you keep infrastructure outside your home legal basket as ordinary diversification. What none of this does is alter your obligations to your exchanges or tax authorities — that ledger is yours.
