Your EA Downtime Is Set by How Fast You Notice, Not How Often Things Break
Two traders run the same VPS and get the same single failure each month. One loses about 2% of the month's trading time to it. The other loses about 12%. The only difference is how often they look.
The idea: downtime = number of failures × time to notice (plus time to fix). Operations engineers call the middle term mean time to detect. For most EA traders it is the biggest number in the equation, and the easiest to shrink.
Step 1. The rule of halves. If you check every X trading hours and a failure lands at a random moment, it waits on average X / 2 hours before you see it.
Step 2. Put it in a month. A 24/5 trading month is roughly 520 hours. One failure a month gives:
| How you find out | Average hours lost | Share of the month |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly check (every 120 trading hours) | 60 | 11.5% |
| Daily check (every 24 hours) | 12 | 2.3% |
| Phone glance every 4 hours | 2 | 0.4% |
| Alert within about 2 minutes | 0.03 | under 0.01% |
Step 3. Compare the levers. Finding a VPS that fails half as often halves your downtime. Moving from a weekly check to an alert cuts it by more than 99%.
The trap: the worst failures don't look like failures. A chart that didn't come back after a restart, or Algo Trading switched off, raises no error. For those, time to notice is simply "until you notice the EA isn't trading".
VRD Terminal Health takes a snapshot of your EA charts, positions and orders every minute and on close, and after each restart reports Clean, a warning, or NOT clean, by pop-up, push or email. It cannot restart the terminal, and it only checks while the terminal is running, so pair it with your VPS provider's own up/down alert.
What to do today: write down how often you really check your VPS. Halve it. That is your average loss in hours every time something breaks.
Try it: Try the free demo of VRD Terminal Health in the Strategy Tester to see the readiness panel it keeps on your terminal (the restart check and alerts run on a live terminal only). $44 to buy, or rent for $30 for 1 month or $39 for 3 months.
https://www.mql5.com/en/market/product/205568
Virtual Risk Desk
Figures are illustrative. Monitoring alerts can be delayed or missed if the terminal, VPS or network is down. Educational content, not trading advice.
