Choosing the Right VPS Specs for Your Trading Strategy

We get this question more than any other: “Which plan do I need?”

The honest answer is that it depends entirely on what you are running. A trader with a single moving-average crossover EA on EUR/USD has fundamentally different hardware requirements than someone running eight terminals with tick-scalping strategies across thirty pairs. Recommending the same plan to both of them would be either wasteful or negligent.

This guide breaks down every hardware dimension — CPU, RAM, storage, and network — with concrete numbers drawn from thousands of VPS instances we manage. The goal is to help you right-size your setup so you are not overpaying for resources you will never touch, and not underpaying in ways that cost you money on missed fills.

CPU: What Your Strategy Actually Demands

CPU is where the biggest misunderstanding lives. Most traders dramatically overestimate how much processing power live trading requires.

Scalping and High-Frequency Tick Processing

If your EA processes every tick, recalculates indicators on each price change, and makes decisions within milliseconds of receiving data, CPU matters. Tick-based scalpers on volatile pairs like GBP/JPY or US30 during the New York session can generate hundreds of ticks per second. Your EA needs to consume those ticks, run its logic, and fire orders before the next batch arrives.

For this workload, 2 dedicated cores is the minimum. If you are running multiple tick-scalping EAs simultaneously, you want 4 cores to ensure they are not competing for processor time during volatility spikes — which is exactly when execution speed matters most.

Swing and Position Trading

If your strategy operates on H1, H4, or daily bars, your CPU is idle 99.9% of the time. The EA wakes up when a new candle forms, runs a few calculations, maybe places an order, and goes back to sleep. A single core could handle dozens of these strategies simultaneously without breaking a sweat.

We have clients running 15 swing-trading EAs on a 2-core plan with CPU usage that never exceeds 8%. If this is your world, do not pay for cores you will never use.

Backtesting and Optimization

This is where CPU hunger gets real. MT5’s strategy tester can use every core you give it during optimization, and it will happily peg them all at 100% for hours or days. A 1000-pass optimization that takes 14 hours on 2 cores takes roughly 4 hours on 8 cores.

But here is the critical distinction: do not run heavy backtests on your live trading VPS. An optimization run consuming 100% CPU will starve your live EAs of resources at the worst possible time. Use a separate instance for backtesting, or run optimizations during off-market hours when your live strategies are inactive. We offer backtesting compute as a separate add-on specifically for this reason.

RAM: The Resource That Actually Runs Out

RAM is the most common bottleneck we see, and it is the easiest to get wrong because traders underestimate how much their setup actually consumes.

The Baseline Stack

A clean Windows Server installation with basic services running consumes approximately 1.2-1.5 GB. Add a single MT5 terminal with a few charts open and you are at roughly 2-2.5 GB. That is your baseline before any trading logic runs.

Per-Terminal Overhead

Each additional MT5 terminal adds 300-500 MB depending on the number of charts, indicators, and history data loaded. MT4 is lighter — typically 200-350 MB per terminal. Custom indicators with heavy computation (neural networks, complex multi-timeframe calculations) can push a single terminal past 800 MB.

When 4 GB Is Enough

If you are running one or two terminals with straightforward EAs — moving averages, RSI-based entries, basic breakout logic — and a handful of charts, 4 GB is genuinely sufficient. You will have roughly 1-1.5 GB of headroom, which is enough for Windows to breathe and for your EAs to operate without memory pressure.

This covers the vast majority of traders running a single strategy on a small number of pairs.

When You Need 8 GB or More

You need more RAM when any of these apply:

Three or more MT5 terminals running simultaneously (common for account separation or running master + followers).
Heavy custom indicators — anything doing matrix operations, maintaining large data arrays, or running ML inference in MQL.
Large symbol watchlists — MT5 pre-loads data for every symbol in Market Watch. If you have 200 symbols loaded, that consumes memory whether you trade them or not. Trim your Market Watch.
Trade copier setups — if you are running a master terminal plus multiple follower terminals on the same VPS, each one consumes its own memory allocation.

A trader running four terminals with 20-30 charts each and custom indicators will hover around 5-6 GB of actual usage. On a 4 GB plan, Windows will start paging to disk, and when Windows pages to disk on a trading VPS, you get latency spikes on exactly the operations that need to be fastest.

Storage: Less Than You Think, But SSD Is Non-Negotiable

SSD vs. HDD

This is not a debate. Never run a trading VPS on spinning disk. Windows itself constantly reads and writes to disk — page files, system logs, service operations — and when your EA needs to write a trade log or MT5 needs to flush tick data, it should not be waiting behind a mechanical arm seeking to a different platter. NVMe SSDs deliver read/write speeds 50-100x faster than HDDs. Every FXVPS plan runs NVMe exclusively. If a provider offers HDD-based plans for trading, walk away.

How Much Space You Actually Need

A fresh MT5 installation occupies about 500 MB. Windows Server takes 15-20 GB. Our pre-configured image with MT4, MT5, the FXVPS agent, and all standard tools comes in around 25 GB.

That leaves plenty of room on even a 60 GB plan. But storage grows over time:

History data: MT5 downloads tick data as you backtest or load charts. A full tick history for a single forex pair going back 5 years is roughly 2-4 GB. If you download tick data for 20 pairs, that is 40-80 GB.
Log files: MT5 writes journal logs, EA logs, and terminal logs. Left unchecked, these can grow to several gigabytes over months. Set your EAs to rotate or limit log output.
Installer and update debris: Old installer files, Windows update caches, and temp files accumulate. A quarterly cleanup of C:\Windows\Temp and old installer files reclaims a surprising amount of space.

For most traders, 60 GB is comfortable. If you are a heavy backtester storing years of tick data for dozens of instruments, 120 GB gives you breathing room without ever worrying about disk pressure.

Network: Latency Over Bandwidth

Bandwidth Requirements

Trading generates almost no bandwidth. A tick stream for an active forex pair during the London-New York overlap is roughly 5-15 KB/second. Even if you are subscribed to 50 pairs simultaneously, you are looking at under 1 MB/second. A standard 100 Mbps connection is wildly overkill for pure trading.

The only scenario where bandwidth matters is if you are running Remote Desktop sessions at high resolution while also trading. RDP at 1920x1080 with frequent screen updates can use 5-15 Mbps. Still well within any modern VPS allocation.

Latency Is Everything

What actually matters is how many milliseconds it takes for your order to reach your broker’s trade server. The difference between 1ms and 50ms does not sound like much, but for a scalper entering and exiting on tight stops, that 49ms of extra latency translates directly into worse fill prices. Over hundreds of trades, it adds up to real money.

The single most impactful decision you can make is choosing a VPS location close to your broker’s trade server. If your broker’s matching engine is in London (LD4/LD5 Equinix), your VPS should be in London. If it is in New York (NY4/NY5), your VPS should be in New York. If it is in Tokyo, your VPS should be in Tokyo. The physics of light through fiber optic cable is the one thing no amount of hardware can overcome.

We maintain server locations in all major financial hubs specifically so you can co-locate with your broker. If you are not sure where your broker’s servers are, ask us — we maintain a database of broker server locations and can recommend the optimal VPS region.

Scaling Scenarios

Single EA, One to Three Pairs

What you need: 2 cores, 4 GB RAM, 60 GB NVMe.

This is the most common setup. One MT5 terminal, one EA, monitoring a handful of pairs. CPU usage will be minimal. RAM usage will hover around 2.5-3 GB. You will never touch the storage limit unless you start downloading extensive historical data.

Multiple EAs Across Pairs

What you need: 2-4 cores, 4-8 GB RAM, 60-120 GB NVMe.

Running five to ten EAs across different symbols in one or two terminals. The EAs may use different strategies with different indicator loads. Memory is the primary concern here — each loaded chart with indicators contributes to the total. If you are staying within one terminal with moderate indicator complexity, 4 GB still works. Two or more terminals push you into 8 GB territory.

Portfolio of Strategies with Multiple Terminals

What you need: 4 cores, 8 GB RAM, 120 GB NVMe.

This is the multi-terminal trader: separate MT5 instances for different account types (live, demo, prop firm challenges), or different brokers for diversification. Each terminal is its own process with its own memory footprint. Four terminals with meaningful chart loads will saturate 4 GB. You need 8 GB to run comfortably without paging.

Signal Service Running Multiple Follower Accounts

What you need: 4-8 cores, 8-16 GB RAM, 120-250 GB NVMe.

Signal providers running a master terminal plus multiple follower accounts, potentially with our trade copier replicating across platforms. This is the heaviest live-trading workload. Each follower terminal or platform instance adds to memory consumption, and the copier agent itself adds a small but non-trivial overhead when processing high-frequency signals across many accounts. Dedicated resources at this scale ensure that a spike in one follower’s processing does not delay execution on another.

Common Mistakes

Over-provisioning CPU. The trader running two swing-trading EAs on an 8-core plan is paying for 6 cores that will sit at 0% utilization forever. We would rather you spend that money on a better broker or more trading capital.

Under-provisioning RAM. This is the expensive mistake. When Windows runs out of physical RAM, it pages to disk. Disk is fast on NVMe, but it is still orders of magnitude slower than RAM. Your EA’s tick processing loop that normally takes 0.2ms now takes 5ms because it had to fault a memory page back from disk. On a scalping strategy, that delay is the difference between a filled order and a requote.

Ignoring server location. A trader running a 2ms-latency scalping strategy from a New York VPS to a London broker adds 70-80ms of round-trip network latency. The strategy’s edge may not survive that. This is the most common and most costly infrastructure mistake we see. Fix the location before upgrading hardware.

Choosing the cheapest plan to save $10/month. If your strategy generates $500/month in profit and a RAM-starved VPS causes one missed trade per week due to paging latency, the math is obvious. Right-sizing your VPS is not a cost — it is a necessary input to a profitable operation.

Our Recommendations

Based on the scenarios above and the workloads we see across our customer base:

Core VPS ($32/mo) — 2 cores, 4 GB RAM, 60 GB NVMe. The right choice for most traders starting out. Single terminal, a few EAs, swing or intraday strategies that do not require tick-level processing. This is not a compromised plan — it is genuinely what the majority of traders need. Start here unless you know your workload demands more.

Pro VPS ($69/mo) — 4 cores, 8 GB RAM, 120 GB NVMe. The sweet spot for serious traders. Multiple terminals, heavier indicator loads, trade copier setups with up to 5 followers, and enough headroom that you never have to think about resources. If you are running more than two terminals or doing any signal copying, this is where you belong.

Scaling VPS ($149/mo) — 8 dedicated cores, 16 GB RAM, 250 GB NVMe. For signal providers, fund managers, and traders running portfolio-scale operations across multiple platforms and accounts. Dedicated resources mean your performance is never affected by other tenants. If trading is your business and infrastructure failure costs real money, this tier pays for itself.

If you are unsure, start with Core VPS. Monitor your actual resource usage through the dashboard — we surface CPU, RAM, and disk metrics in real-time — and upgrade if you see sustained memory pressure or CPU contention. Upgrading takes minutes with no data loss. There is no penalty for starting lean and scaling up when the numbers tell you to.