I've been using Paperspace Gradient Growth recently and really liked it. Their shutdown after 6 hours was annoying, but bearable. And the access to A5000s, A6000s, and A100s for $40 per month was pretty fantastic.

Unfortunately, my account was closed. I was using it to train a Chess engine and I installed Stockfish, which is apparently not allowed. I contacted them because I was having issues logging in and they told me that they "detected unauthorized activities" and explained that I needed to upgrade my account to Paperspace Core to use it.

The 2 most popular services I've seen here are probably vast.ai and podrun, but I don't want to pay hourly. I'd prefer something with persistent storage so I don't need to be constantly processing or uploading large amounts of data.

There's Google Colab Pro, of course. But I don't like their lack of transparency in regards to pricing with their credit system.

Edit: Title should say "unauthorized activities."

Comments

Stunning-Butterfly89 t1_jdbqn4s wrote on March 23, 2023 at 6:56 AM

You can try JarvisLabs. Only pay for your storage which is pretty cheap when VM is off, also you can run VMs as long as you want no 6hr limit. I absolutely love it. It offers 6000, A100s etc

Note: I am not linked with them

fhadley t1_jdbbak8 wrote on March 23, 2023 at 3:58 AM

Sorry for not coming here with an actual answer but why would they ban stockfish?

FermatsLastAccount OP t1_jdcu3ay wrote on March 23, 2023 at 2:12 PM

No idea. I had no idea it was banned until I suddenly couldn't log in and emailed them asking what the issue was.

fhadley t1_jdcwet0 wrote on March 23, 2023 at 2:27 PM

Wait... forreal though? Have you tried to make a fuss out of it? This seems like the kind of outcome they'd want to avoid.

FermatsLastAccount OP t1_jdcz22w wrote on March 23, 2023 at 2:45 PM

I haven't, all I did was post here and on /r/learnmachinelearning. I realized my account was suspended the day before yesterday and emailed them asking about what was wrong.

FermatsLastAccount OP t1_jddmtqn wrote on March 23, 2023 at 5:17 PM

In case you wanted an update, I asked them yesterday how I was supposed to know Stockfish would get me banned and what other Python modules would get my account suspended. They just responded saying they whitelisted and reactivated my account.

fhadley t1_jddnbx3 wrote on March 23, 2023 at 5:20 PM

Super duper sketchy. I have a pre-existing call w their sales folks tm (we're evaluating internally at the startup where I work), debating bringing this up

FermatsLastAccount OP t1_jdeg989 wrote on March 23, 2023 at 8:23 PM

I'll probably stay with them since it's for personal use and they're the best value I've seen, but it's definitely sketchy.

It wouldn't have been as bad if they had just warned me that Stockfish isn't allowed and then taken action if I didn't respond. Instead of first deactivating my account and then responding after I emailed them.

fhadley t1_jdeun1p wrote on March 23, 2023 at 9:55 PM

Yeah I mean it's obviously an overreaction right? And a concerningly intrusive one at that- surely they could've have checked telemetry and verified at least authentic-seemimg behavior on your part. But beyond the knee jerk reaction which can be reasonable chalked up to poor governance at a startup, so, fine, it's like how'd they end up with stockfish on an undocumented dependencies blacklist? I've thought too much about this already lol. Glad you got your access restored though