Vast.aiReviews of vast.ai

they are the best

The good: Seems to be the best place for prototyping there is. Minimum deposit of $5 and an CLI/SDK interface (remember the --raw flag) with custom Docker containers (--priviledged doesn't work.) and a boatload of different options. We've made a distributed Houdini render farm in a matter of a week with testing done in a couple of days. Boot it, render, shut it down, transfer data, terminate - all done with a python script. The understandable: VastAI is a compute marketplace. As such they are the middleman and the end suppliers control their machines. This means owners can trick the system if they put in the effort, and artificially throttle their performance. Happened in ~20% of our instances during testing, but keep in mind we chose non-datacenter, cheap, prototype-level instances. We're implementing a custom benchmark check using PassMark linux CLI's. Since charges apply only when the instance fully loads, this would last ~30-40 seconds and report back the results. Then we compare it to the % of the cpu we get and if the results are off by a given percentage (given a distribution of machines which are good enough for the job) we permanently add them to the blacklist The awesome: Performance for the price is through the roof here. Sometimes 50, even 100% more bang per buck than any other service I know of. The bad: As in any marketplace it's a jungle. Some instances just die during use. Sometimes data is retrievable and other times it's not. We suggest using low-cost upload networking instances and syncing to backblaze often. All in all good work. We got some support. Crazy how it's not more popular, with a more mature toolset. A request for VastAI: make a more stable toolset. The more control we have the merrier, especially when used for serverless.

Great support, thanks man

Rob from vast AI has been great! Helped me with all my queries and provided me with all the necessary documentation which clarified more things.

Watch out! These guys provide false information about the hardware they rent. I tested 10 machines and all of them performed SIGNIFICANTLY WORSE than they were supposed to (GPU, AI benchmarks). RTX 4090 performed like RTX 4060 in all of the cases - there is no way this was a coincidence. Competitors did much better. I asked the support what was happening, they shrugged their shoulders and said "maybe owners are throttling the performance" ... Yeah... No thanks. EDIT: So I got a reply here that I "only spent 4 USD" and that there were no engagements with support. 4 USD was enough to start and benchmark machines - what does that have to do with anything? I approached support on Discord and got that response from staff. So... Yeah.

Vast.ai advertises machines they know are not working. I was charged $50 dollars for renting a faulty machine then Vast customer service are obstructive regarding refunds when they do not deliver the service paid for. No help from Skylar or Jake, just canned responses rather than a quick refund. Vast immediately re-listed the machine knowing it was faulty. (ECC memory error and less than 10% of advertised network speed) Could be a great service, spoiled by irregular practices and deliberately unhelpful customer service. Vast, just be an honest company. Edit: Vast didn't provide the $25 refund described and blocked my account. More dishonesty. Reduced evaluation to 1-star.

Great service with competitive costs. The support answers all questions and solves most issues. Nevertheless, more information needs to be provided about some features, like unverified machines.

I like and satisfied with the Services provided by Jake. he is a good guy and Vast Management should feel Proud on such employees.