Make the hosting boundary explicit
| Area | What to define |
|---|---|
| Environment | Resources, locations, platform responsibilities and external dependencies. |
| Administration | Approved access, configuration ownership and change authorisation. |
| Maintenance | Patch and restart process, notice, validation and escalation. |
| Protection | Backups, usable restore state and replacement-environment assumptions. |
Distinguish infrastructure operation from platform administration and integration support. A hosting contract does not automatically include every task performed by a brokerage operations team.
Choose a location with the whole connection path in mind
Compare routes from important client locations and to required data, execution and business-system endpoints. Document the measurement conditions and which part of the path the proposed region is intended to improve. A geographically nearby data centre is not sufficient evidence of better end-to-end performance.
Assess resource boundaries with a representative workload, including routine jobs. Clarify the provider limits and the evidence retained when an issue occurs. Do not infer platform capacity or recovery capability from a standard VPS tier name.
Agree the evidence delivered at handover
Require an environment inventory, access procedure, monitoring ownership, support escalation route and restoration record for the agreed scope. State what happens when a machine, route or external dependency becomes unavailable. Objectives and tested results should be labelled separately.
Use the hosting acceptance checklist to compare offers. Bring the requirements into an MT5 deployment brief when platform access or new configuration work is also needed, and review the migration plan before moving an existing operation.