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by fxtentacle 2162 days ago
You might be able to significantly lower your monthly bill in exchange for an upfront payment by purchasing your own servers and then renting co-location space.

I'm CTO of an AI image processing company, so I speak from experience here.

I personally use Hetzner.de and their Colo plans are very affordable, while still giving you multi GBit internet uplinks per server. If you insist on renting, Hetzner also offers rental plans for customer-specified hardware upon request. The only downside is that if you call a Hetzner tensorflow model from an AWS east frontend instance, you'll have 80-100 ms of roundtrip latency for the rpc/http call. But the insane cost savings over using cloud might make that negligible.

Also, have you considered converting your models from GPU to CPU? They might still be almost as fast, and affordable CPU hosting is much easier to find than GPU options.

I'm happy to talk with you about the specifics of our / your deployment via email, if that helps. But let me warn you, that my past experience with AWS and Google Cloud performance and pricing, in addition to suffering through low uptime at the hands of them, has made me somewhat of a cloud opponent for compute or data heavy deployments.

So unless your spend is high enough to negotiate a custom SLA, I would assume that your cloud uptime isn't any better than halfway good bare metal servers.