# How do you host a trading strategy? Canonical: https://www.usepancake.com/q/how-to-host-a-trading-strategy **Answer:** There are five common ways to host a trading strategy: a VPS or cloud server you administer yourself, an exchange-linked bot platform, a webhook bridge from a charting tool, a quant platform's cloud, or a managed strategy host. Pancake is the managed option for AI-built prediction-market strategies — the agent submits a strategy version over MCP and the platform runs, versions, and hosts it with a verifiable public record. The hosting question arrives the moment a strategy survives its backtest: the rules need to keep running when your laptop is closed. A useful shorthand is the closed-laptop test — hosting is whatever lets the strategy keep trading its rules after the author shuts the laptop. The realistic options differ on two axes — who maintains the infrastructure, and what record of the strategy's behavior exists afterward. Self-hosting (a VPS or cloud instance running freqtrade, Lumibot, or custom code) gives full control but makes you the operator: process supervision, data feeds, dependency updates, and monitoring are all yours. Exchange-linked bot platforms and webhook bridges (3Commas-style services, TradingView alerts) remove the server but tie you to exchange API keys and keep the strategy's history as a platform dashboard, not an independently checkable artifact. Quant-platform clouds (QuantConnect-style) host research and execution but center on equities and futures. Pancake's model is different: the strategy itself — not server code — is the deployable artifact. An agent (Claude or any MCP-capable client) builds the strategy spec, validates it with a verified backtest, and calls create_paper_deployment; Pancake then runs the strategy against live Polymarket data with simulated fills, recording every event in an append-only ledger. There is no server to run and no code to deploy. The difference that matters for trust: every Pancake strategy version lives at a permanent public URL (///v/) with its result attached, and a paper deployment accrues a ledger-backed track record a third party can inspect. Live execution against real venues is a v2-roadmap capability; hosted verification and forward testing are how a strategy earns its way there. ## Related - [Blog — how to host a trading strategy in 2026, six options compared](https://www.usepancake.com/blog/how-to-host-a-trading-strategy-in-2026) - [Q&A — what is strategy hosting](https://www.usepancake.com/q/what-is-strategy-hosting) - [Q&A — how to paper trade a Polymarket strategy](https://www.usepancake.com/q/how-to-paper-trade-a-polymarket-strategy) --- Markdown twin of https://www.usepancake.com/q/how-to-host-a-trading-strategy — same content as the HTML page, generated from the same source data. More machine surfaces: https://www.usepancake.com/llms.txt