Experienced traders know the advantage of having a VPS, (Virtual Private Server). When using Expert Advisors, it is necessary to be online 24 hours. If you don’t want your computer to be on all day and all night for five days a week, this is where a VPS enters the game.
A forex VPS is part of a Windows server located anywhere on this planet in a datacenter where you will have full root access through your computer via remote desktop. You install your Metatrader or any other trading software among with your Expert Advisors on the VPS and let it run. Even when you shut down your computer, the VPS will still be running.
You can rent a VPS starting from $15 per month through different web hosting companies. The key here is finding a webhost with little downtime, so choose wisely. If at any point your server is down, the Expert Advisor won’t trade any further and you’re at risk of losing money. It’s crucial to find a good web host.
Some brokers offer free VPS when you open a real money account with them. I can’t recommend going with a free VPS because many customers complained that the server went down at some points when the market made big moves. Just imagine that you are in a trade, your server goes down and you can’t close the trade to take profit or to get out of the trade. You’ll go crazy, believe me.
Remember, you get what you pay for! I’d rather spend a little more money to have better quality. Low priced VPS often have less disk space and low memory and will become unstable when installing more than one Metratrader.
I for myself have five to ten Metatrader installations on my VPS. It has 120GB disk space and 8GB memory. When you are a trader running one Metratrader installation only, you can go with a VPS that has 10GB disk space and 1GB memory. Less disk space or memory is not recommended.
When you download history data for backtests, or if you backtest a lot, then you will sooner or later run out of disk space. You might be asking yourself why disk space goes down when doing backtests. I’m not a computer specialist, so don’t expect a detailed answer. All I know is that Metatrader is producing loads of log files eating up disk space with every action you take. So, all you have to do is to get rid of these files, but where are the files located?
Your MT4 installation on the server you normally find in this folder:
Local Disk C:/Program Files (86)/Metatrader4
But you won’t find the large files that eat your disk space here. It’s a bit trickier:
Local Disk C:/Users/Administrator/AppData/Roaming/MetaQuotes/Terminal/
Here in the Terminal folder you will find all your MT4 installations. The names of the folders contain more than 30 letters and digits. Simply double click on a folder and everything will look much clearer.
Go to /history/downloads/. Here you find all the currency pairs you have downloaded in the past for backtests. You can delete the folders for pairs you are not backtesting anymore. Don’t worry, if you decide to test them once again, you can re-download them.
In /logs you can go ahead and delete all the *.txt files.
Under /tester/history/ and /tester/logs/ you can delete everything.
Do these steps for all your MT4 installation and you’ll notice how disk space will increase.
Hopefully you found this article helpful. In case you are looking for a reliable VPS web host, I can highly recommend www.meanlion.com. I’m using their service for hosting my websites and VPS.
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