Why this matters if you've tried renting GPUs before
The market for GPU compute is strange right now. The cheap providers want identity verification, a business entity, or a monthly commitment. The ones that don't ask are often reselling consumer cards from someone's basement with no guarantee the machine is there tomorrow.
We're a thin layer over real datacenter hardware: these are Vultr and Linode GPU instances, deployed from our account, and you pay us in crypto instead of giving a card to a US company. That's the whole trade. You get datacenter GPUs with an email address, and we handle the part where somebody has to have a billing relationship with a cloud.
What you get on the machine
On Vultr the NVIDIA driver is already in the image. Don't install another one on top: that breaks nvidia-smi. On Linode we install the driver during the first boot, and nvidia-smi answers a few minutes after the machine comes up. Either way you SSH in as root and start working.
Reasonable first things to run: a local LLM behind an API, Stable Diffusion or a video model, fine-tuning a small model on your own data, batch inference for a pipeline that would cost more per-token on a hosted API. For bigger models, pick more VRAM: an RTX 4000 Ada card has 20 GB, and an A40 card has 48 GB.
The one rule that's different
Read this bit before you deploy, because it's the one place GPU servers behave unlike our others.
On a normal NoctHost server, running out of balance is recoverable: we snapshot the disk, delete the instance so you stop paying, and keep the snapshot for seven days. Top up and your server comes back with its data.
GPU servers are deleted without a snapshot. When your balance hits zero, the machine and everything on it is gone.
The reason is arithmetic rather than policy. Holding a GPU server's disk in snapshot storage often costs more than the server earned while it was running. Rather than build that cost into everyone's hourly price, we don't keep the snapshot.
So treat a GPU box the way you'd treat a spot instance: push your checkpoints and results somewhere else as you go, and keep an eye on your balance. At $0.73 an hour a $50 balance runs a bit under three days; the dashboard shows the countdown, and we email you before it runs out.
Deploying one
Exactly like any other server: Deploy server, pick the GPU size, then the region, then set a root password. It's live in a few minutes, and you SSH in as root.
Over the API it's the same call you already use, with the plan id:
curl -X POST https://api.nocthost.com/servers \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $NOCTHOST_KEY" \
-H "content-type: application/json" \
-d '{"label":"trainer","planId":"vcg-a16-2c-8g-2vram","regionId":"fra","providerId":"vultr","password":"..."}'Regions
The A16 slices run in Frankfurt, London, New Jersey, Chicago, Silicon Valley, Tokyo, Singapore and Bangalore. The RTX 4000 Ada cards run in Frankfurt, Chicago, Seattle and Singapore. That's capacity, not a product decision: those are the places where our providers have these cards available to us. The region list in the dashboard is built from what can actually be deployed, and it changes when that does.
If you need a card we don't list, tell support what and where. That's exactly the kind of demand signal that decides what we add next.