Recently I saw a post on LowEndTalk from TensorDock looking to “recruit a full time US/EU sysadmin to join our growing team.” I’d never heard of this company, so I checked them out.
Here’s their self-description:
TensorDock provides customers access to accelerated GPU and CPU-only virtual machines at prices 80% less than large clouds. We serve thousands of customers, including AI labs, publicly traded companies, and universities that you might have heard of!
Terabyte-scale CPU-only instances, multimillion-dollar InfiniBand NVIDIA H100 clusters from $1.91/hr each; and the odd NVIDIA GeForce 3090… we do it all — and do it for 80% less than the big clouds!
As you’re no-doubt aware, GPU processing in the cloud is huge. Initially, only the big clouds (Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Public Cloud) offered these boutique services. Now we’re seeing specialty providers enter the market, some like TensorDock with aggressive pricing.
It goes without saying that you’re not going to pay $7/month to rent a box with an Nvidia 4090. Their cheapest offer is a GTX 1070-based system, which includes 2 vcpu, 4GB of RAM, and 20GB of NVMe storage. That’s $.05/hour. While you could multiply that out to say it’s $36/month, I don’t think most people are going to be using it full-time for a month. You’d spin it up, run your jobs, and then remove it.
Of course, that’s just the smallest. There are many bigger systems available.
Opportunities for Providers
TensorDock has a unique marketplace approach. Instead of racking their own servers, they contract with providers around the world. If you’re a provider, you have the opportunity to tap into the TensorDock marketplace and sell your services.
Read more about this opportunity here. They give some sample earnings and full details. Your Nvidia graphics card could earn you a nice monthly income. For example, they estimate a 4090 would pay $200/month, which is pretty quick payback. Of course, you need more than a card – you also need to meet other requirements and they emphasize you need to be a good provider. Their business depends on yours, so service and excellence are very important:
We want high-quality hosts, so we’ll engage in an email conversation to discuss your configuration. Not only does your configuration itself matter, but your interactions, response times, and professionalism matter too; when machines inevitably go down, we need resilient, communicative hosts to deal with the situation.
Opportunities for Engineers
TensorDock is hiring a sysadmin. Check out their LowEndTalk post. They’re offering a base salary, profit-sharing, and equity. The work involves supporting customers and doing some infrastructure dev work on the platform (Python, C, bash). There is some limited travel involved.
I also enjoy using LEBs! I have an empire of little guys for VPNs, larger guys for apps, and big guys for databases and storage. When I'm not in front a screen I'm into German Shepherd dogs, quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop roleplaying games, and forest hiking.
I enjoy writing technical articles here on LowEndBox to help people get more out of their systems. You can find me on LowEndTalk @raindog308
- LowEndBoxTV: Are All Hetzner Locations Alike?No!And Piotr Has the Proof: “This is Clearly Not the Same Processor” - November 22, 2024
- One Week From Tomorrow…THE WORLD WILL LOSE THEIR MINDS!Lines Are Already Forming! - November 21, 2024
- Crunchbits Discontinuing Popular Annual Plans – The Community Mourns! - November 20, 2024
Thanks for posting this @raindog308! :))