How to Run MT5 24/7 Without a VPS — no PC left on.

There is no cloud backup of a running EA. MetaTrader 5 is a desktop program: it executes your Expert Advisor only while it is running on a machine that is awake, online and logged into your broker. Windows does not warn you when it kills the session — it just ends, and the journal writes its last line.

The visible cost is missed trades: the alert that fired at 3 a.m. while your PC was installing updates. The invisible cost is worse — positions your EA was supposed to manage (trail, break-even, scale out) sitting untouched until you notice. That is the entire problem this page solves: giving the terminal a home that never sleeps.

The free-ish route, and where most of us start. Kill sleep and hibernation, disable the lid switch, keep the laptop plugged in, turn off automatic restarts where Windows lets you — and it mostly works. Until it doesn’t.

The electricity is real but modest: a typical desktop idling with MT5 draws roughly 60-120 W, so running 24/7 works out near 45-85 kWh a month — about $5-15 at average residential tariffs, more at European prices. What actually breaks this route is not the bill. It is the unattended Tuesday-night Windows update that reboots the box and leaves MT5 closed (after a reboot nothing re-opens your terminal unless you built autologin plus startup scripts yourself). It is the power blip while you are on holiday. It is your ISP dropping at 2 a.m. and the terminal never noticing.

Verdict: fine if you only trade your desk hours and can watch it. As a 24/7 home for an EA with real money behind it, it is the most fragile option on this page — and the one that fails exactly when you cannot fix it.

The classic answer: rent a Windows server in a data centre and let it live there. You connect over Remote Desktop, install MetaTrader 5 yourself, copy your EAs, indicators and .set files across, log into your broker — and from then on you are the administrator. Windows updates, restarts, disk space, watching that the terminal did not freeze: all yours.

The money: dedicated forex VPS plans typically run about $17-32/mo at entry level (vendor snapshots we checked on July 20, 2026). A generic cloud VPS looks cheaper at roughly $6-12/mo, but that price buys an empty Windows box: every minute of setup, patching and monitoring is your evening, not theirs.

None of this makes a VPS bad. It makes it a tool sized for a different job — and for the single job of “keep one MT5 alive so my alerts execute”, renting a whole Windows computer to babysit one program is more machine, and more admin, than the problem needs.

The third route skips the server entirely: you do not rent a machine, you rent the running terminal. SFCloud is a managed MetaTrader 5 in the cloud, built for the SignalForge bridge — MT5 pre-installed in your own terminal, isolated in its own container, created automatically after payment (usually within about 30 minutes; we email you when it is ready), and we look after the machine and the terminal. You open it from any desktop browser over HTTPS: no RDP client, nothing installed on your device.

Your own EA can run there too: upload a compiled .ex5 (or a .set preset) from the dashboard, up to 10 MB, then attach it to a chart in the terminal. The honest limits: .mq5 source is not compiled inside SFCloud (compile it in MetaEditor first), EAs that depend on Windows DLLs are not guaranteed, and EAs bought or rented on the MQL5 Market do not activate there today — if you rely on those, a Windows VPS is still the right tool. SFCloud on its own gives you your own MT5 terminal, with its own memory limit. And because the client is a desktop browser, it works the same from a Mac or a Chromebook; on a phone it is fine for quick checks, so glancing at positions from the train is a browser tab, not a remote-desktop app.

Two things worth stating plainly. First, your broker login: you enter your MT5 login, server and password in the dashboard over HTTPS, and the password is written only to your own terminal’s configuration so MT5 can sign in again after a restart — it is never stored in our database (TLS-encrypted access, each terminal in its own isolated container, data centres in the United Kingdom and France). And the price is a flat $6.99/mo standalone, cancel anytime — some months less than the electricity-plus-headaches of Option A, and a fraction of a dedicated VPS. That price is the hosted terminal only (the TradingView bridge is not included); the bundles with it (Starter + SFCloud at $9.99/mo, Trader + SFCloud at $19.99/mo) live on the pricing page.