Vast.aiReviews of vast.ai

> I rented a Verified RTX 4090 instance that advertised over 600 Mbps network speeds. GPU training and disk access worked, but outbound transfers were extremely slow and unstable. Throughput sometimes dropped to 10–20 KB/s, and connections repeatedly > terminated while I was trying to retrieve my trained checkpoint. > > I tested direct SSH/SCP, Vast proxy SSH, Jupyter HTTPS, and plain HTTP, with similar results. This wasted more than ten hours of my time and caused additional rental charges. > > Support only stated that bandwidth is shared and not guaranteed, refused compensation, and suggested renting another instance to copy the data—even though that copy would still depend on the affected host’s network. > > I understand that shared bandwidth can fluctuate, but a Verified host delivering effectively unusable throughput with repeated disconnections should be investigated. Customers should not bear all additional costs when they cannot retrieve their > completed work. Based on this experience and the refusal to provide a refund or credit, I will move important training workloads to another platform.

I am disappointed with Vast, I spent a tremendous amount of time preparing may machine, the earnings were nothing near what the calculator announced, an order of magnitude lower, the GPU was not listed correctly, support was not helpful during the month I listed the machine, (now it’s surprisingly fast), and now I had to top up a separate account to rent a machine while still having unpaid earnings with no way to retrieve it.

I've hosted a few machines with Vast.ai over the last 2-3 years. As a side hobby it's OK, but I recommend serious businesses stay away. The machine verification process is opaque and arbitrary. There is no guarantee when it will happen, and only vague guidelines to "keep the machine online" and "it depends on demand", even though "it's an automated process". Machine maintenance is problematic, since reliability score is impacted whenever a server is restarted, even if to apply critical security patches. Using a maintenance window, and ensuring there are no current clients, still impacts reliability score. This encourages hosts to leave machines online without security patches, to retain reliability scores.

Previous review: ------ Fantastic way to monetise your GPU if it's sitting there gathering dust. Great community, and the support team has always been very helpful when I encountered technical issues. New update: ------ Not friendly to hosts. It has hidden listing rules that determine whether your instance appears in the renter's search results. This rule has a huge impact on the visibility of your machine and thus rental. However, vast ai is not explicit about these rules. As a result, my machine does not show up in search result most of the time, despite very competitive spec / cost. And there is nothing i can do.

The service is cheap but the on-demand instance randomly disconnected me after a few days. Luckily I could reconnect before anyone else jumped on, otherwise it would be a total loss - all data gone. As expected customer service is nonexistent - "we'll be with you in just a minute" = infinite hold