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 fully managed MetaTrader 5 in the cloud — MT5 pre-installed, your own isolated environment auto-provisioned in minutes after payment, and a watchdog keeping the terminal alive. You reach it from any browser through KasmVNC: no RDP client, nothing installed on your device.

It runs any Expert Advisor — upload your .ex5/.mq5/.set files in one click, or install them yourself inside the session; if it runs on MT5, it runs there. One SFCloud carries up to 3 MT5 terminals with the built-in launcher, so a main account plus a prop-firm demo can live under one price. And because the client is the browser, it works from a phone, a Mac or a Chromebook: checking positions from the train is a browser tab, not a remote-desktop app.

Two things worth stating plainly. Your broker credentials stay yours: you type them directly into MT5 inside your private session, and SignalForge never requests, stores or sees them (TLS-encrypted access, per-client isolation, EU data centre). And the price is a flat $6.99/mo founder offer, cancel anytime — some months less than the electricity-plus-headaches of Option A, and a fraction of a dedicated VPS. The bundle maths with the bridge live on the pricing page.