
Ask HN: Are hourly priced dedicated servers for AI/ML a good idea? - red0point
On Hetzner or other providers, one can find lots of high performance dedicated servers, some even with graphic cards as powerful as a GTX 1080.<p>The problem is, you have to rent them for 100 EUR minimum per month plus set up - which doesn&#x27;t make sense if you&#x27;re a ML&#x2F;AI engineer who just needs to train a model or two for a few hours.<p>Thus the plan is to buy some of those servers upfront and rent them out on a cheap hourly basis to ML&#x2F;AI researchers, or even some cloud gaming companies. I&#x27;ve done some research on the technical side of things and I think this should be entirely possible to do.<p>I calculated that with about 50% usage one could sell an instance with a Nvidia GTX 1080 with an i7-6700, 64GB RAM and 500GB SSD for about 0.5 USD&#x2F;h - which is significantly cheaper than AWS&#x2F;GCE and probably ideally suited for AI&#x2F;ML tasks.<p>But is this really a good idea? I&#x27;m always very excited about new side projects to do, but often overlook critical flaws in my ideas. For instance, why are companies like Hetzner not already doing this?<p>Thanks!
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minimaxir
This is literally the model that AWS/GCE does.

Due to their economy of scale, you won't be able to outprice them for on-
demand usage unless you have an added value/gimmick.

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some_account
I agree with previous poster. You will never be able to rent out machines
cheaper than the cloud platforms without making a huge loss.

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namanyayg
Another commenter answered succinctly, but for the next time a side project
can be evaluated for viability by also calculating estimates for fixed and
marginal costs & doing more competitor research. Has always helped me.

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red0point
Thank you for your feedback.

I will do such research in more detail in the future.

Back of the napkin calculation results in 0.5 USD / h for an instance with a
GTX1080 - compared with an equally GPU performant EC2 instance g3.8xlarge
clocking in on about 2.28 USD / h.

