Vast.aiReviews of vast.ai

Competitive prices for graphics cards and great instant customer service, so helpful.

Sometimes my instances just stop but that can be ameliorated by aggressive checkpointing. Customer Service is fast and just all around nice. 4/5 for rare infra issues which at this price point is a 5/5 really :)

They help me :)

very efficient

Scott helped with an ongoing issue. Thanks for helping me get my new servers verified

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 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.

Cheap and usable, can't ask for more. Only downside is expensive data transfer charges. Otherwise fine.