Choosing the location nearest to yourself
The leg that matters runs from the server to the broker. You connect weekly; the EA connects on every order.
Virtual Private Server
A rented remote computer that keeps MetaTrader open around the clock — so an EA keeps trading when your own machine sleeps or drops its connection, and sits nearer the broker's servers.
also: VPS, trading VPS, MT5 VPS, virtual hosting
Updated · Reviewed
In plain English
A computer in a data centre whose only job is to keep MetaTrader open. It does not make a strategy better; it removes the ways a strategy stops running for reasons that have nothing to do with trading.
Why it matters
An EA exists only while its terminal runs, so downtime deletes trades rather than losing them. On the 27 records published here, more than half of every backtest entry lands outside 08:00–16:59 UTC — and the busiest single hour, 00:00 UTC, is nine in the morning in Tokyo.
- A missed entry logs nothing. The trade is simply absent, and the record drifts from the backtest with no error to trace.
- Windows reboots on its own schedule. On a desktop that is an interruption; on a machine holding positions it is an outage.
- Latency matters in proportion to the target, and these targets are long: no record's median trade is under an hour.
In MetaTrader 5
Where it appears in MT5
- Navigator → right-click the account → Register a Virtual Server — MetaTrader's own hosting, rented in the terminal
- Tools → Options → Expert Advisors → Allow Algo Trading — the switch to re-check after every restart
- Toolbox → Journal — the local log. The hosted terminal keeps a separate one
How EAs use it
- Nothing in the EA changes. A VPS is where the terminal runs, not something the code addresses.
- Virtual hosting migrates a snapshot. A third-party VPS runs a full terminal — what custom files, DLLs or several terminals need.
- Uptime only helps if the EA survives a restart. One that rebuilds state from open positions in OnInit recovers; one holding it in memory does not.
Typical settings
| Setting | Typical value | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Latency and RAM | not measured in this catalogue | This site publishes no host telemetry, so no millisecond or memory figure here would have a source. The hold is measured: 1,362.6 minutes. |
| Operating system | Windows Server | MetaTrader is a Windows binary. A compatibility layer adds its own failure modes. |
| Host clock | leave it alone | EAs read TimeCurrent(), the broker's time, not the host's. Seven of these 27 records expose a GMT-offset input and six leave it at 0. |
Common operational problems
- The rental lapses or the card expires, and the instance is suspended with positions open.
- The terminal starts but the account is not logged in. The chart looks normal; the EA is idle.
Related MT5 functions
- TerminalInfoInteger(TERMINAL_CONNECTED)
- Whether the terminal has a link to the trade server — the heartbeat to log.
- TerminalInfoInteger(TERMINAL_TRADE_ALLOWED)
- Terminal-level permission. False after a restart that left Algo Trading off.
- TimeCurrent()
- Broker server time — the clock a session filter reads, not the host's. The ledger stamps on this page are UTC, a third thing again.
Example
An hour of downtime costs each strategy a different fraction of its year, because entries are not spread evenly.
- Sundial, entries inside one UTC hour
- 557 of 557
- Tradewind, same measure
- 6.12%
- Median across the 27 records
- 14.85%
Ask which hour your EA needs before comparing uptime figures between hosts.
Calculation 555 of Sundial's 557 entries carry the timestamp 00:55 UTC
Result One outage window erases a whole strategy and barely grazes another
How it is used
Match the hosting to how long the strategy holds, not to the price of the plan.
| Range | What it means |
|---|---|
| Median hold under 2 hours (2 of 27) | The round trip is a visible share of the move; pick the broker's region. |
| Median hold 2–24 hours (6 of 27) | A basic nearby instance is enough; buy restart behaviour instead. |
| Median hold over a day (19 of 27) | Latency is irrelevant. Uptime is the entire purchase. |
| Any hold, on a home machine | Workable only while watched; most of these positions outlive their opening day. |
- Set MetaTrader to start with Windows, then reboot deliberately to prove it. Confirm the account logged back in and Algo Trading is still on.
- Measure the round trip from the VPS to the broker's trade server, not from your desk.
Broker-hosted free VPS offers attach a minimum balance or a monthly volume condition; read the qualifying terms first.
Common mistakes
Assuming MetaTrader's virtual hosting keeps syncing
It migrates a snapshot when told to. Change an input locally afterwards and the hosted copy trades the old value.
Reading the busiest hour off the wrong clock
These ledger stamps are UTC. Read 08:00–16:59 as broker time and the off-desk share moves from 54.28% to 64.49%.
In depth
When a terminal actually has to be awake
| Measured across 27 published records, 18,219 backtest entries | Figure |
|---|---|
| Entries outside 08:00–16:59 UTC | 54.28% |
| Trades opened and closed on different calendar days | 64.71% |
| Median holding time, all trades | 1,362.6 min |
| Shortest median hold of any record (Chrysalis) | 67.5 min |
| Records carrying a set GMT-offset, DST or session-hour input | 8 of 27 |
| Median entries per year, per record | 56.4 |
Two rows decide the purchase. More than half of all entries arrive outside desk hours, and nearly two thirds of positions survive into the next calendar day — though only 48.36% run past 24 hours, because a calendar boundary is not a duration. Seven records expose a GMT-offset input and six leave it at 0; three of the eight set any clock input to a non-zero value at all. Moving a terminal between regions changes nothing about when it trades.
One missed hour is not one missed hour
The median record puts 14.85% of its entries in its single busiest hour. Sundial puts all 557 of them there, 555 stamped 00:55 exactly. Tidewell Slack fits every entry into two consecutive hours; Almanac fires at three fixed times a day — 00:55, 07:50 and 15:00 — so one outage can only ever take one of them. Tradewind’s busiest hour holds 6.12%.
The cost of an outage is a property of the strategy, not the host. A 99% uptime figure means one thing for an EA that trades every hour and another for one that only exists at 00:55.
A quiet strategy and a dead terminal look identical
At its quietest the median record goes 53.4 days between consecutive entries. Windrose once went 193.4 days without one. Chrysalis went 760.8 — but it is the only record here whose ledger skips a whole calendar year, and the other 26 logged 3,770 entries during that silence. A rule shaped as “alert me if nothing traded this week” fires constantly on healthy strategies and stays silent through an outage on the slow ones.
Watch the terminal, not the ledger. Log TERMINAL_CONNECTED on a timer and treat the missing heartbeat as the alarm.
Related terms and what to check next
A VPS changes where an expert advisor runs, never what it does. The execution half of the decision belongs to slippage and the broker’s execution model. The strategy half reads against scalping, whose targets are small enough for the round trip to show. Broker-bundled VPS offers are gated on balance and volume; XM’s is the one documented here. Every listing in the catalogue publishes the ledger behind it, so you can check the hour distribution of the EA you intend to host.
Frequently asked questions
- Do I need a VPS to run an MT5 EA?
- Only if it is meant to run unattended. An EA trades while the terminal is open and connected, so a machine that sleeps, updates or drops its link stops the strategy silently — and most entries in our published records fall outside desk hours.
- What VPS latency does an EA need?
- It scales with the target. A scalping strategy chasing single-digit pips needs to share a data centre region with the broker; this catalogue publishes no latency measurements, so we will not put a millisecond figure on that. Anything holding for hours is unaffected by a few hundred milliseconds, and every record here holds for more than an hour.
- Is MetaTrader's built-in virtual hosting the same as a VPS?
- It serves the same purpose differently. It rents a hosted terminal from inside MetaTrader and migrates a snapshot of your charts and EAs — simple, but a one-time copy. A conventional VPS is a full Windows machine you administer, which is what custom files or several terminals need.
- Will a VPS make my EA more profitable?
- No. It removes downtime and shortens the distance an order travels; it does not touch the strategy. What it changes is the gap between the trades a backtest contains and the trades an account actually took.
- How do I check a hosted terminal is still trading?
- Not from the trade list — quiet strategies and dead terminals show the same empty screen for weeks. Log TerminalInfoInteger(TERMINAL_CONNECTED) on a timer and alert on the missing heartbeat.