Setting up a VPS for MetaTrader properly

2 October 2026 · Soft Trade Enterprises · All guides

Why a VPS at all

An Expert Advisor only acts while the terminal is open and connected. On a home machine that means your PC must stay on, awake, online and un-rebooted, permanently. Windows Update alone makes that unrealistic.

A VPS is a Windows machine in a datacentre that stays on. That is the whole proposition — not speed, not magic, just continuity.

Specifications that are actually enough

Resource	One terminal	Three or four terminals
RAM	2 GB	4–8 GB
CPU	1 vCPU	2 vCPU
Storage	40 GB SSD	60 GB SSD
OS	Windows Server 2019 or 2022

MetaTrader is not demanding. What kills a cheap VPS is not the EA but the terminal's history download and the chart rendering — both of which you can cut dramatically by reducing the number of open charts and limiting history depth.

Location matters more than specification

Latency is the distance between the VPS and the broker's server, not between the VPS and you. A VPS in Mumbai with a broker in London is a poor pairing even though it is close to you.

Ask your broker where their servers are and pick a datacentre in the same city. London, New York and Frankfurt cover most international brokers; Mumbai is right for Indian exchange work. You want single-digit or low double-digit milliseconds, which you can confirm on the terminal's status bar after connecting.

Configuration checklist

Everything below is done once, and together they are the difference between a VPS that keeps running and one that silently stopped three days ago.

• Disable sleep and hibernation entirely, including the display timeout
• Set Windows Update to notify, not auto-restart, and pick an install window at the weekend
• Enable auto-login so the desktop session resumes after a reboot without someone typing a password
• Put MetaTrader in Startup so the terminal launches with the session
• Enable "Allow Algo Trading" in Tools → Options → Expert Advisors
• Tick "Save account passwords" so the terminal reconnects unattended
• Set a static timezone and disable automatic DST changes if your EA uses local time for anything
• Limit history — Tools → Options → Charts → "Max bars in chart" to something sane, not unlimited

Auto-restart after a reboot

Putting a shortcut in the Startup folder covers a normal reboot. It does not cover the terminal crashing while the machine stays up. A small scheduled task that checks every few minutes is the practical answer:

REM check-mt5.bat - run from Task Scheduler every 5 minutes
tasklist /FI "IMAGENAME eq terminal64.exe" | find /I "terminal64.exe"
if errorlevel 1 (
    start "" "C:\Program Files\MetaTrader 5\terminal64.exe"
)

Set the task to "Run whether user is logged on or not" and to repeat indefinitely.

Know when it stops

A VPS that stopped quietly is worse than no VPS, because you believe it is working. Give yourself a heartbeat — the simplest version is an EA that pushes a notification to your phone once a day:

void OnTimer()
{
   static datetime lastPing = 0;
   if(TimeCurrent() - lastPing < 86400) return;

   SendNotification(StringFormat("%s alive | equity %.2f | positions %d",
                    _Symbol, AccountInfoDouble(ACCOUNT_EQUITY), PositionsTotal()));
   lastPing = TimeCurrent();
}

A message that does not arrive is the alert.

Housekeeping

• Clear MQL5\Logs and MQL5\Files periodically — logs grow until the disk fills, and a full disk stops the terminal
• Keep a copy of the MQL5 folder somewhere else; a VPS is rented, not owned
• Change the default RDP password immediately and do not reuse it
• Never install anything else on it — the VPS has one job

Who pays for what

The VPS subscription is in your own name and billed by the provider directly to you, so you keep control of the machine and the credentials. We do the provisioning, the installation and the configuration above, and hand you a machine that is already doing its job.