Why local machines fail
A home computer is a fine place to develop and a poor place to execute. Windows updates reboot at inconvenient hours, residential connections drop, and power interruptions occur exactly during the volatility that produces the trades you most wanted to take. The failure mode is not that the machine breaks; it is that it stops paying attention for eleven minutes.
Choose proximity over specification
MetaTrader 5 running one strategy on one symbol is not computationally demanding. Two virtual cores and four gigabytes of memory is comfortable. What matters is network distance to your broker's execution servers, because that is the variable that shows up in your fills.
- —Identify your broker's server location — most publish it, and most cluster in London, New York or Tokyo.
- —Pick a VPS in the same metropolitan area, and confirm sub-10ms round trip before committing.
- —Prefer providers with published uptime histories over those with impressive marketing.
- —Avoid oversubscribed 'forex VPS' resellers where CPU steal time makes latency unpredictable.
The maintenance routine
- —Disable automatic restarts and schedule updates for a fixed weekend window when markets are closed.
- —Enable MT5's auto-restart and log the terminal journal to a location you actually read.
- —Set an external uptime monitor that alerts you when the terminal stops reporting, not when the server stops responding.
- —Take a snapshot of the fully configured machine so a rebuild takes minutes rather than an evening.
What good looks like
Sizing, snapshots and keeping the machine boring
A trading VPS should be the least interesting computer you own: one purpose, few programs, no browsing, and a configuration you could rebuild from notes in twenty minutes. Most hosting failures are not hardware failures — they are the accumulated consequence of a machine that gradually became a general-purpose desktop.
Specification is usually not your problem
MetaTrader 5 running a single expert advisor is not computationally demanding. Two virtual cores and four gigabytes of memory are ample for one or two terminals. What matters far more is uptime guarantees, the provider's maintenance policy and how quickly a snapshot can be restored after a failure.
- —Run one terminal per instance where practical; isolate failures.
- —Take a snapshot after every configuration change, before it matters.
- —Disable automatic operating system restarts during market hours.
- —Install nothing that is not required for trading.
Monitoring, alerting and recovering from an outage
The failure that hurts is the silent one: the terminal disconnected at two in the morning, the algorithm stopped, and nobody knew until the following afternoon. Monitoring does not need to be sophisticated, but it must be independent of the machine being monitored, because a dead server cannot send you its own alarm.
A minimal but sufficient alerting setup
Everything discussed here is applied on a public, third-party verified account — updated continuously, losing weeks included.