I tried using PaperSpace for a while but it works maybe 1 in 3 times I tried to use it, they (temporarily) banned me for no reason, they send me "itemized" bills with empty line items, and their support was no help.
If getting a gpu is not practical, I'd try one of the K80s or other cheaper GPUs on AWS for all your debugging and then port to the more expensive instances only if you need them. Doing this as a hobbyist will be relatively inexpensive. I think a lot of the cost incurred as a hobbyist comes from reserving a gpu when you don't actually need it.
OVH charges $2 per hour for a V100S
I'm also not a fan of having to upload files to Google Drive and then write special code to import them. It means my code isn't portable to run locally or anywhere else and it's just extra effort. I just want normal file access and to write scripts like I normally would.
Still, I was spurred to ask the question because some people are categorically opposed to anything Google due to privacy issues.
That's a use case more suited to running a VM itself.
Hobbyists often use our free tier (30 hrs of GPU per month) or pay for more compute ($0.69/hour) to do a variety of GPU workloads.
We do prohibit things like DDOS attacks and cryptocurrency mining.
paid services on AWS:
- Amazon Sagemaker Studio
- Amazon Sagemaker Notebook Instances (think EC2 + jupyter + integration with AWS services)
They provide persistent storage and access to the full JupyterLab or Jupyter Notebook software, unlike Colab. I find this makes life far easier, since all my normal terminal workflows work fine.
OVH actually has a (distantly) similar service (much less user friendly than grid and without the whole "grid" feature, but that matters less for hobbyists if you're not doing a lot of parallel runs). I liked the OVH one a lot in principle, but in practice found it too buggy to use properly (and they don't have customer support). For a budget project it could be worth trying.
I've migrated several notebooks from Colab to JupyterLab when playing around with various generative art models; it's a drop-in replacement and runs on your local machine's hardware.
I did have to do some fiddling to install a bunch of Nvidia crap on my local machine, however; blame CUDA.
Disclaimer: I work for Deepnote
The GPU add-on cost is about 7.50$ per hour for a 12 GB K80 (which has 24GB, so you share it? Also, it's from 8? years ago?). As an add-on, other vendors would give you V100s (possibly multiple ones).
I am pretty sure that's not actually what you are offering, because that would be ridiculous. So you probably want to update your pricing page ;-)