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Per-user dedicated IPs, and why prop firms care

Why shared cloud IPs are a silent failure mode for prop traders — and how TICPOZ solves it.

Last updated · 2026-05-13

If you run an automated strategy from a cloud server and that server — or its gateway — is shared with other traders, you have a problem most retail platforms will not tell you about. The problem is not technical. It is contractual. Prop firms read outbound IP addresses and use them as a signal for collusion.

The collusion-detection logic

Every major prop firm runs some version of this check. When an account opens a trade, the firm logs the originating IP from the broker session. If two accounts open the same trade on the same instrument within a narrow window from the same IP, that pair gets flagged. If the pattern repeats across multiple instruments, the accounts are presumed to be coordinating. The firm voids the trades, refuses the payout, and in many cases bans both traders from re-applying.

From the firm's perspective this is reasonable. Collusion is a real fraud vector. A bad actor can split capital across multiple challenge accounts, take hedged positions across them, and guarantee one account passes the challenge while the other fails. The firm loses money on every such pair. So the firms get aggressive about flagging it.

The collateral damage falls on honest traders who happen to share infrastructure. If you and another trader both run independent strategies that egress through the same gateway, and both happen to trade EURUSD at 09:31 UTC on a Tuesday because your independent strategies independently saw the same London-open signal, you both look like colluders.

The collateral damage is real
We have seen multiple cases — including before TICPOZ existed — of traders losing payouts not because their strategy did anything wrong, but because they shared an outbound IP with another user of the same platform or cloud provider. Firms apply their rules consistently. The appeals process is slow and rarely overturns the original decision.

What does not solve the problem

A few common workarounds do not actually fix this:

  • A residential VPN. The exit nodes are shared with thousands of users. Firms know the typical VPN address ranges and treat them as suspicious by default.
  • A self-rented cloud server you alone use. This works in theory, but the address your provider assigns may have been used by other traders before you. We have seen accounts flagged based on the prior history of an inherited IP.
  • Running the strategy from your home connection. This works until your ISP rotates your dynamic IP mid-session — which kicks the broker connection and may cause missed trades. Also: your laptop has to be on.
  • A shared automation platform that runs every user's strategy through the same egress. This is the worst case, and it is what most “trading bot as a service” platforms quietly do.

The TICPOZ approach

Every TICPOZ user is allocated a real, routable, dedicated IPv4 address at signup. It is bound to that user's outbound broker traffic, never shared with another user, and held for the lifetime of the account. From the broker's point of view, every connection from a given TICPOZ user comes from a single, stable, dedicated source.

The address is not a NAT slice, not a shared egress, and not a reused one — it's provisioned fresh, vetted for clean reputation before it ever carries trader traffic, and torn down only when the user account is closed. That covers the most common failure mode by construction.

A cost line we choose to absorb
Per-user dedicated IPs add a recurring infrastructure cost we could avoid by gating everyone behind one or two shared addresses. We refuse to, because the failure mode of a shared egress is silent: the trader thinks their strategy is running fine and only discovers the problem on payout day. We treat shared egress as a defect, not a cost-saving.

What this does not do

Three honest caveats.

First, dedicated IPs do not guarantee you pass a prop firm. They eliminate one specific false-positive failure mode. The firm can still flag you for consistency violations, news trading where the rules forbid it, or strategy patterns that look like latency arbitrage. A clean IP gets you through one filter; the rest is on the strategy.

Second, dedicated IPs do not make your strategy faster. Latency from our infrastructure to a regional broker gateway is in the single-digit-to-low-double- digit millisecond range and that is good enough for any retail timeframe. Anything tick-sensitive at the sub-millisecond level needs broker colocation, which is outside the scope of a SaaS product.

Third, if you breach a prop firm's rules — daily drawdown, maximum loss, news avoidance — a dedicated IP does not protect you. The firm will still close your account. We talk about that in our prop-firm automation post.

The closing thought

Per-user dedicated IPs are not a flashy feature. They do not show up in marketing screenshots. Most traders will never think about them. But for the subset of users running prop accounts, or who care about the cleanliness of their broker session, this is the kind of decision that quietly compounds into trust.

The price is the price.