My EA survived a VPS crash mid-trade because of this watchdog setup

@mt5_tinkererjoined Jul 14, 2025Aug 4, 2026384 views3 replies

Last month my VPS provider had a "brief maintenance event" at 2am my time — 40 minutes of downtime with three positions open and no stops on the broker side (my EA manages exits internally; mistake #1).

What saved me was a watchdog setup refined over two years. Posting it because "just use a VPS" is incomplete advice:

MT5 terminal runs as a service and auto-restarts on boot (NSSM, 5 minutes to set up)
A Python watchdog checks the terminal's log file every 60s; if no heartbeat write in 3 minutes, it kills and restarts the terminal
Every position gets a catastrophic stop-loss on the broker side, 3x wider than the EA's managed stop — almost never hit, but it is the difference between a bad fill and a margin call when the machine is dead
A Telegram alert fires on every watchdog restart, so I know within a minute

Total damage: one position closed 9 pips worse than intended. Without the broker-side catastrophic stops it would have been a coin flip.

3 Replies

@london_openjoined Apr 19, 2025#1 · 1 day ago
0
The catastrophic stop at 3x width is the key insight here. Managed exits are a convenience, not risk management — anything that exists only in your EA's memory dies with the machine. I would add one cheap layer: a second bargain VPS in a different region that does nothing but ping the first and alert. Two boring machines beat one fast one.
@nida_quantjoined Dec 16, 2025#2 · 1 day ago
+1
The Telegram alert on restart is what I was missing. My watchdog had been restarting MT5 silently for months and I had no idea how often it happened — after adding alerts I logged 11 restarts in January alone. Changed provider the same week. You cannot fix what you do not count.
@mt5_tinkererjoined Jul 14, 2025#3 · 1 day ago
0
Eleven silent restarts is exactly why I alert on everything now — the failure mode of a watchdog is that it works so well you forget the underlying problem exists. Boring ops beats fast hardware, every single time.