Virtual Private Server?

Has anyone gone to using a Virtual Private Server for hosting their MT4 and EA? I'm looking into these and apparently for $30-200 a month, they keep constant connection and the PC is always on. It's supposed to be secure, but I have doubts there.

A little nervous about this but it seems like the only affordable option at the moment. Who's tried it?

I've never used a VPS so I can't answer your question directly, but may I ask why you feel the need? The way I see it a VPS is useful or worth the price if you need to have a completely unattended ea for several months or more or if there is some unavoidable reason you can't keep your PC on 24 hours a day.

If you host your ea on your PC (as is usual) and you check it every day then what's the worst that can happen? Just my opinion here, but a good ea should be able to handle a few hours offline if your PC inadvertantly shutdown.

Another thought..there are some forex brokers who will allow you free use of a VPS if you keep some sort of balance in the account. Might be worth looking into.

You're right, a good ea should be able to. but what I have is a scalping EA which will run on 15mn and it could suffer from an internet outage of a few hours or more, like while I sleep or am at work. It's not that I mind if it shuts down, but if it is not on, trades will not exit.

Again, this is just my current system and I'm thinking far ahead here. I change my mind and code daily so, just speculating.

If the broker offered this, that would be pretty cool. I found one VPS for 30 a month USD, but I have no faith in the integrity of their systems at that price.

I understand that. You can use what I call a catastrophic stop loss.Try setting a hard stop loss far away enough so that it won't get hit during normal operation of your ea. In other words your ea would have stopped out normally before the cat stop loss gets hit. The cat stop loss is exactly that, in case something goes horribly wrong you will still have stops in place to protect your account.

I'm interested in how well your scalping ea performs live! Let me know.

If I kick some a$$ I'll send you the code since you're a good fella, It's mostly someone else's code anyway, I just made my changes to make it safe. This guy was living by the sword, but his underlying method was pretty good.

So far I only built one quasi-profitable one from scratch. The rest were junk, but gave me valuable information about certain methods.