Your EA never stops.
Even when it would have.
Every forex VPS claims 99.9% uptime. They're all measuring the wrong thing. A server can be perfectly healthy while your Expert Advisor sits detached, disconnected, or with AutoTrading quietly switched off — placing no orders at all. We watch for that.
Windows Server licence included · MT4, MT5 & cTrader · 5 regions · No setup fee
The problem
Three ways your EA stops that nobody else detects
Almost every provider monitors whether terminal64.exe is running.
That only catches the rarest failure. These are the ones that actually cost money —
and from outside the terminal, all three look completely fine.
The EA detaches from the chart
A profile reload, a failed update, or a crash-and-recover leaves the terminal open with a clean chart and no EA attached. The process is running. The smiley face is gone. No orders are placed and nothing alerts.
AutoTrading gets switched off
One button, often toggled by an update prompt or an accidental click during an RDP session. The EA is attached and appears to be running. Every trade signal is silently discarded.
The terminal wedges without dying
MetaTrader stops processing ticks but the process never exits. Windows reports it as healthy, your provider's monitoring reports it as healthy, and your strategy has been frozen for six hours.
How it works
The probe runs inside your terminal
You cannot detect a stopped EA from outside the platform, so we don't try. A lightweight heartbeat runs on one chart in each terminal and reports what is actually happening on the inside.
Heartbeat from inside
A small MQL5 advisor on one chart writes your connection state, trade permission, equity and open position count to disk every 30 seconds. If the EA isn't ticking, the heartbeat stops — that's the signal.
Staleness, not liveness
Our watchdog escalates on an ageing heartbeat rather than a missing process. A wedged terminal, a detached EA and a hard crash all produce the same unambiguous symptom, and all three get caught.
The right fix, or none
Stale heartbeat, we restart and relaunch your terminal. Fresh heartbeat but disconnected from the broker, we alert and leave it alone — that's broker-side and a restart would only lose your session. Restarts are rate-limited so a genuine fault can never become a crash loop.
What we won't pretend to fix
If your broker's server goes down, restarting your VPS achieves nothing. If your EA's logic is wrong, a faster server makes it lose money faster. We tell you which of those is happening instead of rebooting the box and hoping.
Included on every plan
Configured the way a 24/5 box should be
This is the tuning most traders never get around to, and that a general-purpose cloud will never do for you.
Windows never reboots itself
Updates download and stage; the reboot is a scheduled maintenance decision, never a 3 a.m. surprise mid-position.
Accurate clock
Hardware-backed time sync. Clock drift corrupts order timestamps and breaks time-gated strategy logic.
Nagle disabled
Order packets are small packets. Left alone, Windows batches them and adds up to 200 ms of pure delay.
No CPU throttling
Dedicated compute, not burstable credits. A 24/5 EA is exactly the workload burstable instances throttle.
Auto-start on boot
Terminals relaunch and log in after any reboot, with no RDP session required from you.
Antivirus tuned, not disabled
Exclusions scoped to platform and tick-history directories, so scanning stops taxing your I/O.
Isolated instance
Your own VM with local administrator. Never a shared desktop where another customer's EA starves yours.
Snapshots
Restore points before every maintenance window, so a bad update is a five-minute rollback.
Plans
Priced with the Windows licence in it
MT5 uses roughly three to four times the memory of MT4 and runs one thread per EA and per symbol, so clock speed matters more than core count. Sizing below is honest about that — a plan that can't hold your terminals isn't cheaper.
Sentry
One or two terminals. A single EA or a handful of pairs.
- 2 dedicated vCPU
- 4 GB RAM
- 80 GB NVMe
- 1–2 terminals
- Watchdog included
- Windows licence included
Rampart
Multiple terminals, or MT5 with a trade copier alongside.
- 4 dedicated vCPU
- 8 GB RAM
- 160 GB NVMe
- Up to 4 terminals
- Watchdog + alerting
- Windows licence included
- Daily snapshots
Citadel
Portfolio EAs, many pairs, or managing accounts for others.
- 8 dedicated vCPU
- 16 GB RAM
- 320 GB NVMe
- 8+ terminals
- Watchdog + priority alerting
- Windows licence included
- Hourly snapshots
Early access. Create your account and pick a plan above. We still provision the first servers by hand so nothing is misconfigured on day one, then email you your RDP address and credentials. Questions first? hello@bastionfx.online.
Locations
Pick the region your broker actually lives in
Most MT4/MT5 brokers host in one of a handful of Equinix facilities. Choosing the wrong region costs you more latency than any amount of hardware can win back. In MT5, open Tools → Options → Server to find your broker's hostname, then ask them which facility it maps to.
| Region | Nearby broker hub | Typical brokers | Measured p50 RTT |
|---|---|---|---|
| London, UK | Equinix LD4 — Slough | Most UK & EU brokers | Measuring |
| N. Virginia, US | Equinix NY4 — Secaucus | US & offshore brokers | Measuring |
| Frankfurt, DE | Equinix FR2 — Frankfurt | EU brokers | Measuring |
| Tokyo, JP | Equinix TY3 — Tokyo | JP & APAC brokers | Measuring |
| Singapore | Equinix SG1 — Singapore | APAC & offshore brokers | Measuring |
We will not claim sub-millisecond latency
When a provider advertises "under 1 ms", they are measuring from the VPS to something in the same building — usually their own speed-test endpoint. It tells you nothing about the path to your broker. Sub-millisecond execution requires a cross-connect inside the broker's own facility, and any host that has one will beat us on that number.
We run in cloud regions adjacent to the major hubs, which puts us in single-digit milliseconds of most brokers. That removes execution cost for nearly every retail and semi-pro strategy, and it is not enough for latency arbitrage. If arbitrage is your strategy, buy a cage at LD4 — we'll tell you that before you pay us, not after.
The table above says "Measuring" because our regional probes are still running. We'll publish real p50 round-trip times per region, alongside the method and the date they were taken. We would rather show you nothing than show you an estimate dressed up as a measurement.
FAQ
Questions worth asking any host
Which brokers do you support?
All of them. MT4 and MT5 builds are broker-branded, so there is no single generic installer — we install your broker's own build during provisioning. Tell us your broker at signup and your terminal is ready before your first login.
Is the Windows licence really included?
Yes, on every plan, at the price shown. This is the most common hidden cost in forex VPS pricing and we'd rather not compete on a fake headline number.
How many terminals can I actually run?
Budget about 1 GB for Windows plus 350–500 MB per MT4 terminal, and 1.2–1.5 GB per MT5 terminal with charts and EAs loaded. Add a trade copier and size up a tier. Anything under 2 GB of RAM total cannot reliably hold even one MetaTrader instance after Windows overhead, which is why our entry plan starts at 4 GB.
What happens when Windows wants to reboot?
Nothing, until you decide. Updates download and stage, but automatic reboots are disabled by policy. You get a maintenance window you choose, a snapshot taken beforehand, and your terminals relaunch and log back in automatically afterwards.
Will you debug my Expert Advisor?
No, and you should be suspicious of a host that says yes. We support the server, the platform installation, the network path and the watchdog. Your strategy's logic and its results are yours. We will happily show you watchdog logs proving whether the platform was running when a trade did or didn't fire.
Do you guarantee uptime?
We publish a 99.9% monthly SLA, which permits roughly 43 minutes of downtime a month. Treat any host advertising "100% uptime" with real scepticism — read what their SLA actually pays out, and whether the number covers the platform or only the hypervisor.
Can I test latency to my broker before committing?
Yes. Take a plan monthly, run your terminals for at least 48 hours, and watch for freezes, disconnects and sustained CPU. If the region is wrong for your broker we will migrate you to another at no charge. Never sign an annual contract before you have measured the path to your own broker.
Find out the next time your EA stops.
Not the next time you check your account.