How to Choose a VPS

A VPS keeps your EA running around the clock in a data centre instead of on a machine at home. They are not all the same, and the specifications that sell them — cores, gigabytes, disk — are rarely the ones that matter for trading. What matters is where the server sits relative to your broker, and whether it stays up. Here is the order to judge them in.

1. Location — measured to the broker, not to you

The single biggest factor. Your VPS should be close to your broker's trade server, which usually sits in London (LD4/LD5), New York (NY4) or Amsterdam. A VPS in your home city is worthless if the broker sits on another continent. Find out where your broker's server lives — support will tell you — then pick hosting in that data centre or one nearby.

2. Latency — the number location buys you

Location is the cause; latency is the result you can measure. For automated trading, aim for single-digit milliseconds to the broker; anything under 30ms is workable for most strategies. A host that specialises in forex will quote latency to named brokers. Test it yourself once you are on, rather than trusting the sales page.

3. Uptime — the figure that protects open trades

An EA that stops mid-trade is worse than one that never started, because it leaves positions unmanaged. Look for an uptime guarantee of 99.9% or better, backed by a written SLA. Even 99.9% allows around 8 hours of downtime a year — ask what happens to your session when the host reboots, and whether the terminal restarts on its own.

Forex-specialised VPS hosts beat generic cloud servers for one reason: they place their data centres next to the brokers and quote latency to them. A cheaper general-purpose cloud VPS often sits far from the trade server, and you pay for that in slippage.

4. Specs — enough, not maximum

MetaTrader is light. One MT4 or MT5 terminal with a couple of EAs needs roughly 1GB of RAM and modest CPU. So:

1 to 2 terminals — 2GB RAM, 1 to 2 vCPU.
3 to 5 terminals — 4GB RAM, 2 vCPU.
More — scale RAM first; each terminal is memory-hungry rather than CPU-hungry.

Pay for SSD storage and a recent Windows Server version. Buying 16GB for a single EA is money spent on nothing.

A worked example

Two plans. Plan A: a generic cloud VPS at £6 a month, 120ms from your broker. Plan B: a forex VPS beside the broker's server at £18 a month, 3ms. Your EA trades 300 times a month. The extra slippage on Plan A costs roughly 0.4 pips a trade — about £0.32 on 0.10 lots, or £96 a month. Plan B costs £12 more and saves the best part of £90. The cheap VPS is the expensive one.

The Karnek note

Karnek runs in your browser, not on your VPS, so watching the account adds no load to the server your EA depends on. It reads the terminal read-only and can never place, change or close a trade.

See it in Karnek: Karnek's health monitoring tells a dead VPS apart from a stalled EA.