So what is the pricing? The website has a login-wall to access the pricing.
(All values in $ I assume)
0.25x24x30.5=183
For 100 Eur, or about $120, you can get a 1080 inside A DEDICATED SERVER (!!) at Hetzner: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ex51-ssd-gpu?co...
I guess I have a business idea then: charge 0.5/h to rent the 1080, pocket the $63 difference per month and call it profit, undercutting Snark by 33% without even doing any crypto mining or anything on the side.
Or, just call it step 1 for mega profits! Step 2: resell the CPU computing power, step 3: resell the SSD storage space, step 4: resell the bandwidth, etc. (not sure you can resell the unused RAM, but that's another "innovative business" waiting to happen!!)
Compared to renting servers and properly configuring them (anycast, geoip, etc) I often fail to see the value that "distributed" or "cloud" offer provide besides fast scalability.
It is nice to be able to put 4x more GPUs online in a few hours instead of a day, but I am not sure it commands a 33% premium except in very specific marginal cases.
2 years is a Moore's Law doubling, which I've found tends to mean hardware offerings will be different. They're not necessarily dramatically different, if there's no new/unmet market demand, but this was a noteworthy enough one that I was (and still am) touting it as an advantage of own-hardware over cloud infrastructure.
I do not mean that in a bad way, just in a logical way.
I mean, they are already making a profit at $120/month, so I guess their response to you will be "sure, buy as many servers as you want, price is $120/each". You will be back to square one, trying to sell your hourly services to scientists who need GPUs.
Then the initial problem remain: anyone with a baseline demand for GPUs is better off renting them at hetzner. They can use you for small loads, or unanticipated needs. But then it will be for a short time, before they opt for a monthly rent.
Even then, for this peak demand, you compete straight on against google cloud and aws. You certainly undercut their ridiculous prices, but it is not clear to me how better off I am chosing you compared to hetzner+any other cloud offering.
I am just talking as a prospective client (I often need GPUs!) who fails to see what's unique or interesting in your offer. And if you know less about your competition than your prospective clients, I see that as a bad sign: your offer may not be priced right.
Maybe I am wrong, and you are just aiming for a different kind of clients, with a time-sensitive but less elastic demand, yet not as inelastic as someone who will pay top $ for google or aws? Feel free to explain me if there is business secret at risk here.
Good luck anyway!
We are experimenting with pricing and if you want to rent for a whole month our price will be cheaper than that, email us. Just thinking about efficient utilization, you might end up paying less if you don't have 24/7h jobs running.
At the same time, we are building software stack to utilize these hardware efficiently for Deep Learning applications. We need those resources for offering higher level ML products.
Anyway, the more competition the better, and I'm sure you will find a place!
I suspect that, in general, it commands an even higher price premium, as irrational as that may seem (or actually be).
This particular business is based off the notion of fixed budgets (and, presumably, short time limits), which means that, no matter how much cheaper over all it is to rent resources for a full month, it's worth the premium to rent as much as you can for a result in 10 days.
This reasonining can apply to an early startup, too (in terms of time-to-market and unpredictable scalability), but it becomes actually-irrational when it's not re-evaluated and a huge premium [1] is being paid for routine, easily-predictable infrastructure sourced from cloud providers.
[1] hundreds of percent, i.e. multiples
That being said, cloud hosting is also funny in a different way: it reminds me of the late 90s, when you had to declare your hostname and use a ftp account to upload your files to your host.