About and method

We read the public MT4 and MT5 server lists once a day, resolve every hostname, and look up where each address is hosted. Brokers that publish the same addresses, logo or website are shown as related, with the evidence. Locations are city-level estimates. Regulation status is what the broker declares on its MetaQuotes firm card. Nothing here is investment advice or a statement about any company's ownership.

Method

MetaTrader terminals find a broker through a public list: each company publishes server names, and each server publishes one or more access points, written as an address or a hostname with a port. Once a day we read both lists (MT4 and MT5), resolve every hostname to its current addresses, and look up each address: country, city, network (AS number), and the hosting provider. Provider and cloud region are stated as fact only where the address falls inside a range the provider itself publishes; otherwise the page names the network.

A server is Live or Demo when the broker's firm card says so. Where the card says nothing, the kind is read from the server name (“Real”, “Live”, “Demo”, “Trial”) and shown with a dotted underline. Everything else is Unlabelled.

Which brokers are related

Two brokers are shown as related when they publish the same things. The link score, in words:

• The same address and port counts most: up to five such endpoints.
• The same address on a different port counts half as much, again up to five.
• Addresses next to each other (the same /24 range, no address in common) count a little, up to four ranges.
• The same logo file and the same website domain each count as much as one and a third shared endpoints.
• An address many brokers use counts for less: every shared address is weighted down by how many companies are on it.

The total is shown only as Strong, Medium or Weak, always beside the evidence: which addresses, which ports, how much of each broker's address set they are. There is no similarity percentage, and a link is never a statement about ownership.

Hubs

An address used by more than 12 brokers is a hub: most likely a shared front, a bridge or a technology provider. A hub is listed on its own page and on every broker that uses it, but it is never counted as a link between those brokers.

Groups

An infrastructure group is a set of brokers connected to each other through strong and medium links. A group is named after its best-connected member. Very large groups are split by dropping their medium links, so one busy hosting company does not merge half the industry into one group.

The Monitor

Every difference between two daily refreshes is recorded, and the Monitor turns the differences of one broker in one refresh into one story. A migration is claimed only when the city or the provider of live servers changed; new addresses in the same city on the same provider are “changed addresses”. A broker that leaves the lists is “no longer published”: we do not know whether it closed. The first live run after the seed snapshot is the baseline run: it holds everything that changed between the snapshot and that day. It is shown under its own label, apart from the daily stories, and is what the Monitor shows until the first daily changes exist.

Sources

• Server lists. The public MT4 and MT5 broker search: company names, server names, logo, website, and access points.
• Firm cards. The company card MetaQuotes publishes for MT5 brokers: declared regulation status, legal country, registration, offices, contacts, and for some servers leverage, account currencies and minimum deposit. New companies are read first, then the cards checked longest ago, about one a second.
• DNS. Every hostname is resolved again each day, which is how a move to a new address is noticed.
• IP geolocation. Country, region, city, coordinates, network and reverse DNS for every address, checked when first seen and again on a slow rotation.
• Published cloud ranges. The address ranges AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle and other providers publish, which give the cloud region of an address.

Limits

• Locations are city-level estimates. IP geolocation places an address in a city, not in a building. The site never names a data centre hall, and an address behind a CDN or anycast front has no single place at all: such addresses are marked.
• Regulation is declared, not verified. “Regulated (declared)” repeats what the broker states on its firm card. It is not checked against any regulator's register, and “None declared” or “No firm card” says nothing about whether a broker holds a licence. Firm cards are read gradually; until a broker's card has been looked for it reads “Not checked yet”, and the figures on the regulation page count only the brokers checked so far.
• Shared hosting is evidence, not proof. Brokers end up on the same addresses for many reasons: a common technology supplier, a hosting reseller, a white-label arrangement, a shared protection service. The site shows the overlap and leaves the conclusion to the reader.
• Distance is not latency. City shortlists and the placement finder rank by great-circle distance. Nothing here is a measured round-trip time.
• The lists are the truth we have. A broker can run servers it does not publish, and can publish servers that no longer answer. History starts on 18 May 2026, the date of the seed.
• Nothing here is investment advice or a statement about any company's ownership.

Data status

The refresh runs once a day and each step is independent: when a source is down, the site keeps the last good data for that step and says so here.

API

Every list and detail view is available as JSON under /api/v1/, with the same query string as the page it mirrors: filter a page, then swap the path. The brokers table, one broker's endpoints and the Monitor export as CSV; the Monitor is also an RSS and a JSON feed. No key is needed. Answers are cached for about a minute and the data changes once a day, so there is nothing to gain from polling faster.

curl '/api/v1/brokers?host=gb&reg=regulated&sort=-servers&limit=20'
curl '/api/v1/brokers/exness-technologies-ltd'
curl '/api/v1/ip/185.97.1.4'
curl '/api/v1/search?q=AS16509'
curl '/api/v1/monitor?type=migration&since=30d'
curl '/api/v1/locations?kind=live&platform=mt5'
curl '/api/v1/datacenters'
curl '/api/v1/clusters?size=5-19'
curl '/api/v1/regulation?legal=cy'
curl '/api/v1/brokers.csv?provider=aws' -o brokers.csv
curl '/api/v1/monitor.csv?since=90d' -o changes.csv
curl '/monitor/feed.xml?tier=3'

CSV downloads: all brokers, brokers that declare a regulator, every change of the last 90 days. Feeds: RSS, JSON Feed.

Multi-values are comma-separated and lower-case (host=gb,nl); a sort is a column key with - for descending; unknown parameters are ignored. The brokers list answers with total, rows (200 at a time) and next_cursor, plus a ready next link; the Monitor answers with stories and next_cursor. In every list a published port is never empty: where a broker publishes none, the port is MetaTrader's default 443 and portAssumed (CSV: port_assumed) says so.