I Solved the Power Problem. The Real Failure Was Software.

When I started building my automated trading system, I worried about the obvious threats.

Power outages. Internet outages. Hardware failures.

Living in the Dominican Republic, those aren't hypothetical risks. Power interruptions — what locals call apagones — are part of life here. The grid is unreliable, and if your system is managing open positions and monitoring stop losses around the clock, that's a problem you have to solve before you go to sleep.

So I solved it.

An EcoFlow battery backup keeps my laptop and trading workstation running through short outages. A dedicated UPS keeps my modem and router alive. I wrote about that setup in detail in my last post.

Problem solved, right?

Not exactly.

Because a few weeks ago I learned something that applies to a lot more than trading systems:

The biggest threats are usually the dependencies you forgot existed.

The Morning Everything Was Still Running

I sat down at my desk expecting a normal morning.

The laptop was on. The internet equipment had power. The trading server was active. The battery backups had done exactly what they were supposed to do.

But my logs were full of errors.

The system couldn't reach OANDA. TradingView had lost broker connectivity. My monitoring processes were failing silently.

My first assumption was that OANDA was having issues. Then I assumed it was my internet provider.

Neither was true.

The culprit turned out to be something I hadn't considered a critical dependency at all.

My VPN.

The VPN That Became a Single Point of Failure

I run NordVPN. I work online, manage financial accounts, and frequently connect from outside the United States. A VPN seemed like a sensible layer of protection.

What I didn't think through was how completely that VPN had inserted itself into the communication chain between my trading system and the outside world.

When the VPN tunnel had trouble reconnecting overnight, DNS resolution started failing. That failure cascaded into everything that depended on it:

• OANDA API requests failed.

• TradingView lost broker connectivity.

• Monitoring services couldn't reach external endpoints.

• Automated trade management couldn't verify open positions.

The system wasn't offline. The power wasn't out. The broker wasn't down.

A piece of software running quietly in the background had become a single point of failure — and I had never once thought of it that way.

The fix required injecting persistent static routes to bypass the VPN tunnel for specific traffic. Not complicated in hindsight. But it cost me time and trade data I won't get back.

When Monitoring Fails

The VPN wasn't the only lesson from this stretch.

At another point, my Telegram alerting system stopped working because a bot token needed to be regenerated. The trading engine was still running. The monitoring layer wasn't.

That's arguably worse than the system being down.

A failure you know about can be fixed. A failure you don't know about just keeps running.

I also caught myself running an older version of my trading server instead of the current production version. I had restarted the wrong one after an outage and didn't notice for days.

The strategy logic was fine. The management layer wasn't the one I intended to run.

Again, not a hardware problem. Not a power problem. A process problem.

What Reliability Actually Means

This whole experience forced me to rethink the word "reliable."

Before this, reliable meant:

• Backup batteries

• UPS units

• Redundant internet

Now I'd add:

• DNS resolution under every network condition

• Authentication tokens that don't silently expire

• Monitoring systems that actually alert you when they fail

• API connectivity that doesn't route through a VPN tunnel

• Version control — meaning knowing which version is actually running

• Dependency awareness — meaning knowing what your system talks to and what happens when those connections break

Every one of those can stop an automated system just as effectively as pulling the power cord. Sometimes more effectively, because the failure isn't immediately obvious.

The Cloud Is on My Roadmap

One conclusion kept surfacing as I worked through all of this.

Most of the problems I ran into were local. Local networking. Local VPN routing. Local DNS. Local hardware. Local power interruptions.

That's one reason cloud hosting has moved onto my roadmap. A virtual server in a datacenter eliminates entire categories of the problems I spent weeks diagnosing:

• No laptop

• No UPS dependency

• No VPN routing conflicts

• No local DNS failures

• No apagones

That doesn't mean the cloud is risk-free. Every solution shifts the risk somewhere else. But it puts power, networking, and uptime in the hands of people who specialize in exactly those problems.

I'll get into the specifics of that transition in a future post.

The Real Lesson

I originally thought building a resilient trading system was mostly a hardware problem.

Get the right UPS. Get the right battery backup. Keep the internet alive.

Those things matter. I'm not walking that back.

But power turned out to be one of the easiest problems to solve.

The harder part is mapping the invisible dependencies that sit quietly between your system and the outside world — the software layers you never thought of as infrastructure until they failed.

Because when an automated system goes down, it's rarely the thing you were expecting.

Sometimes it's the VPN running in the background.

Sometimes it's a bot token.

Sometimes it's just the wrong version of your own software.

The obvious threats are the ones you plan for. The hidden ones are the ones that actually get you.

Disclosure: Some links on this page are affiliate links. If you sign up or make a purchase through these links, I may earn a commission at no additional cost to you. I only recommend products and services I personally use or believe provide value to traders and investors.