I’m not a particular fan of renting things but I also don’t like wasting money. So when I needed a decent GPU that isn’t AMD for training a neural network there are really only two options: Fork out upwards of $1000 or rent a GPU. I went with the latter. So here’s my experience or lack thereof with a few different cloud providers:
- Google Cloud (Garbage)
- as much as I hate Google I thought that this would be the most sensible choice as they seem to be fairly popular and their prices listed were pretty low
- first of the most unsurprising thing: The $300 for testing are just bait, they do not work for GPU VMs
- second of all the sign-up process is a fucking joke, be prepared to give them your DNA, first born and tax records for the last ten years
- finally: they don’t actually give you any GPUs without contacting their sales department first, I didn’t bother, because they can just go fuck themselves
- Linode/Akamai (Also garbage)
- sign-up is easier, but they’ll just deny your account with no further explanation
- Vultr (???)
- will not give you a VM unless you open a ticket after which they’ll ask you what your planned usecase is
- didn’t bother answering them
- Vast.ai (Good)
- i think this is basically a marketplace for GPUs
- selected one with a low rate ($0.25/h)
- set-up was fast and simple, had root access and could start the training after a couple of minutes
- accept crypto and credit cards, I paid with MATIC, because it was the fastest coin with the lowest fees
- they can retain data on a rented instance for $1.25 per day, I just backed my data up to my server instead
- only downsides I can see are that you might not find an instance that matches your requirements (storage space, RAM, GPU etc) but the selection seemed pretty wide
- also each instance has a maximum rent time, mine had four days which was more than enough since i only needed it for a couple of hours
- some instances can be rented for weeks or even months
- there could be a chance of getting a bad instance, but I assume you’d notice that pretty quickly and get your money back
So tl;dr: Big companies suck, they don’t even want your money and will make you jump through hoops, while vast.ai worked immediately with no issues.