A trading VPS fails quietly. Terminals don't crash with a red banner — they drift out of sync, run low on disk, lose a connection over the weekend, and keep looking fine until Monday's open finds an EA that hasn't traded in three days. A short weekly routine catches that drift before it costs you.
Why weekly, and why a fixed routine
The forex week has a natural seam: the Friday close and the Sunday-night reopen. That gap is when disconnections happen, when the broker rolls the server, and when a terminal that has been up for weeks accumulates the memory bloat and stale history that make it miss the first ticks of the new week. Doing the same checks in the same order every week turns "I think everything's running" into "I verified it." A routine you can rush through in ten minutes is a routine you'll actually do.
Pick a fixed slot — most people use the weekend, after Friday's close and before Sunday's open — and run the full list every time, even the weeks nothing looks wrong.
The weekly checklist
Work top to bottom. Each item is a yes/no you can answer in under a minute:
- Connection. Every terminal shows a live connection to its broker server, not "No connection" or "Waiting for update". Check each account, not just the first.
- EAs enabled and trading. The AutoTrading button is green and each chart shows the EA's smiley/active icon — a disabled EA looks identical to a working one at a glance.
- Open positions match expectation. The number and direction of open trades is what your strategies should be holding. An orphaned or duplicated trade is your earliest warning of a magic-number or restart problem.
- Disk space. Confirm free space isn't creeping toward zero. Log files, tick history and journal files grow relentlessly; a full disk freezes every terminal at once.
- RAM and CPU headroom. The box should sit comfortably below its ceiling at a quiet moment. If it's already near the limit while calm, it will choke at the next simultaneous news spike.
- Logs and journals. Skim each terminal's Journal and Experts tabs for repeated errors, requotes, "trade context busy", or off-quotes — recurring warnings are a slow leak, not a one-off.
- Time and server sync. The VPS clock is correct and the broker's server time is what your session-hour filters expect. Clock drift silently shifts every time-based rule.
- Pending updates. No MetaTrader "new version available" prompt is sitting unattended, and no Windows Update is queued to reboot mid-week. Apply them deliberately, on your schedule, not at 03:00 on a Wednesday.
- Backups current. Your set files, templates and the numbering registry are backed up somewhere off the VPS. If the box dies, you can rebuild in an hour, not a weekend.
A worked pass
Say you run 12 terminals on a 4 vCPU / 8 GB box. A typical Sunday pass: eleven terminals show a live connection, one reads "No connection" after the weekend maintenance window — reconnect and confirm its EA re-enables. Free disk has dropped from 40 GB to 22 GB over three weeks as tick history accumulated; still fine, but note the trend so you clear old logs before it bites. RAM sits at 5.8 GB of 8 — under the ~6.4 GB usable ceiling, but the margin is thinner than last month because you added two symbols, worth a capacity re-check. The whole pass took eleven minutes and caught one dead connection that would otherwise have skipped Monday's open entirely.
Monthly, on top of the weekly
A few checks don't need weekly cadence but must not be skipped forever:
- Restart terminals deliberately to clear accumulated memory, ideally over the weekend gap — long-uptime terminals bloat and slow down.
- Prune old logs and history to reclaim disk before it forces an emergency clean-up.
- Re-verify capacity after any change in EA count, symbols or history depth, so your headroom hasn't quietly evaporated.
- Review the magic-number registry against what's actually running, so no collision has crept in with a new deployment.
Takeaway
Uptime is not health. A VPS that's "on" can still have a dead connection, a full disk or a disabled EA, and none of those will page you. Run the same short list every week in a fixed slot, watch the trends between weeks rather than just the snapshot, and you'll catch silent failures on your schedule instead of the market's.
