Hi TwoHands, I'm not using a VPS, I'm running it all off a laptop at the moment. I have set up 5 x MT4 terminals (excluding my dedicated backtesting terminal, so I actually have 6 terminals) - each dedicated to 1 account / 1 EA.
I wouldn't say my internet quality is fantastic - its average. I notice from the sound alerts that I probably average 2-3 dropouts per day at any hour of the day. However typically dropouts last less than a minute.
I haven't noticed the droputs affecting EA execution. I am sure it will happen if the timing is right, but the only important time the EA needs to be connected is when a condition triggers an action that the EA needs to execute. 3 out of 5 of the EA's are H1, H4 or daily, and those EA's only need actual connection on the hour/4-hour/daily rollover to execute whatever they need. The other 2 EA's are H12 EA's (which MT4 doesn't support) so these 2 EA's rely on H4 bars (which I group into 3's via calculations in the EA to simulate H12 bars) for certain conditions and M5 bars for other conditions. So the highest risk of a drop-out affecting EA execution is if a dropout coincides with an M5 rollover, but the main risk if a dropout occurs and it re-connects within several minutes is some slippage if the EA executes on the next M5 bar - I haven't seen it happen yet. Certainly I don't believe any such slippage risk/cost is worth the cost of a monthly VPN charge.
So short answer is because of the timeframes I don't think VPN connection is worth it for the types of EA's I'm using. I guess if you were using very short timeframe scalping EA's based on say tick or M1 charts VPN might be worth it.
The laptop seems to handle all this quite well in addition to whatever work I'm doing, which I do mostly on my laptop. I have a desktop which is faster and probably what I will do is when I am ready to add some more terminals I will migrate the lot to the desktop and dedicate that to handling all the EA's.
