Hosting your MetaTrader 4 Server 101 (Part 1)

The following guest post is courtesy of Anya Aratovskaya, VP of Institutional Sales at Fortex.

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This article will be very informative for any company that is considering the purchase of an MT4 Server license and consequently, planning the budget. I will cover topics that include the initial set-up process as well as pricing. This is a personal assessment and not necessarily the opinions of Fortex.

Please note that if you already have a MT4 license, you can use your MQ forum login and find all relevant information there. Everything other than pricing is covered on the corporate site in a very detailed and easy to read format.

Let’s begin…

FortexThe MT4 License package comes with 3 license files for LIVE, DEMO and the Test servers.

The best source for the installation instructions and guidelines is the MQ support forum (you will receive your login credentials after the purchase is completed).

Based on my experience, knowledgeable IT person should be utilized to perform the installation and all IT related work.  Since the platform will be the core of your business, you really must assure that it is set up correctly. Furthermore, if you are planning to run your own MT4 server, you should consider having at least one IT person available on site. Ideally, you should have someone watching the server 24/7.

Please follow the suggestions and recommendations of the platform developers – no one other than developers will advise you better. If MQ advises that you host your LIVE server on a physical machine, consider this as good advice! I’ve personally seen many brokers experience difficulties by hosting their LIVE servers on Virtual Machines. You can certainly save money in the short term by using the cloud network. However, you may end up losing more money by doing so in the long term. The Cloud hosting will only work and be beneficial if your server is not processing many trades. Otherwise, please strongly consider utilizing a physical machine.

It would also be wise to have your back-up server hosted in a different datacenter for redundancy purposes. You may even consider hosting it in a different country or on an entirely different continent. Once that’s been accomplished, it would be important to locate more datacenters and install additional proxy-servers/MT4 Access Points/MT4 Datacenter Applications (global access points for better connectivity).

Let’s keep these thoughts going and summarize…

  1. One Datacenter location for a physical machine with LIVE server license and one virtual machine (acceptable to use for demos, but recommendation is still to use physical machine) for DEMO server
  2. Another machine in preferably different Datacenter for the BACK UP server (MetaQuotes provides Watchdog application that will copy all your data from main MT4 server to the backup in real time).
  3. Two to three additional datacenters for the Proxies/MT4 Datacenter applications (virtual machines) – (You may end up needing more datacenters as it is purely based on your client’s geography).

Everything that we have discussed may sound complicated.

For the newcomer, it is indeed complicated. As you are getting more and more involved and experienced, you will learn more and will eventually become familiar with all of the terms, definitions and the overall lingo. I hope that the steps outlined above will help you build a solid infrastructure for your soon-to-be blooming business.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this blog post – which will cover the process of selecting the right datacenter/service provider and some of the costs involved.

My email is [email protected].

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