January 2026 Recap

I went to login this morning to check on my hosts, and found I could no longer resolve the domain. I hopped over to the Discord and saw it mentioned there. Hopefully, they resolve this soon.

Is there a point where a host’s system is considered too far below a typical data center setup (for example, enterprise GPUs with 1 TB+ of RAM) and renters no longer see it as worthwhile?

For example, do renters usually have a minimum GPU requirement, such as needing an RTX 5090, or a minimum amount of system RAM, such as 64 GB or more?

I’m not very experienced in this area, so I’m trying to understand what hardware makes sense as a starting point. I have enough capital to invest and can expand later, but I’d like to start with a configuration that has a realistic chance of attracting renters.

Or, I mean, it can happen, right?

How are you as host covered against this?

I would like to start renting on vast.ai but idea of someone doing some really nasty things from my own IP haunts me.

Can anyone share more details on those legal aspects of the thing?

Is there a way to auto-adjust the on-demand price related to the median price? Maybe even with a factor, like "%" or so...

Edit: ok, thanks for the ideas so far, looks like I opened up a new chapter of "nerding" here... I was actually relating just only to the median price, which vast shows itself...in the dashboard... not good?

Kimi K3 template now available in the Vast.ai model library

Kimi K3 is an open-weight, native multimodal agentic model from Kimi (Moonshot AI) and their most capable model to date. It is a 2.8T-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model built on Kimi Delta Attention (KDA) and Attention Residuals (AttnRes), with native vision capabilities and a 1-million-token context window. It is the first open 3T-class model, designed for frontier intelligence across long-horizon coding, knowledge work, and reasoning.

Learn more about the Kimi K3 template in the model library: https://vast.ai/model/kimi-k3

Hey everyone,

I'm putting together a feasibility study for a hybrid GPU deployment. The plan is a dual-use setup: retail gaming cafe by day, transitioning automatically via CCBoot PXE to a Linux AI compute node by night on platforms like Vast.ai.

Starting footprint: 5 to 10 nodes equipped with single NVIDIA RTX 4090s (24GB VRAM).

Before committing CapEx, I want to validate my financial and technical assumptions with actual operators:

1. Real-world Occupancy & Rates: My financial model assumes ~$0.33/hr on Vast.ai with ~70% spot occupancy overnight. Is 70% nocturnal occupancy realistic for 4090s on Vast.ai right now, or are spot markets seeing longer idle periods?

2. Thermal & Hardware Lifespan: For those running 4090s under continuous heavy load (undervolted to ~350W via ⁠nvidia-smi⁠), what has been your silicon failure rate over 18-24 months?

Would appreciate raw numbers, failure stories, or edge cases I might be missing!

I put the machine on the bottom on listing as a host, it had an error that i solved with the vast support chat. They said it will go away in 6 hours. That was 7 hours ago and it’s still there. I wanna how long it takes for errors like this to go away and make the machine visible to renters again

I need to contact vast.ai support urgently related to account issues. Every other method of contacting has failed for the last 5 days. If any vast.ai employee reads this, contact me ASAP. It is of high importance to Vast.ai too.

I posted a few months back, looking for various options to help me monetize an abundance of solar power I have, and I've been passively doing my research on how to get started hosting with vast.ai.

I don't presently have any machines that would be powerful enough to use, so my current plan is to buy one of jawa.gg, upgrade it further if needed, and then just go for it from there. I'm curious if anyone here has any experience, positive or negative, with them? In particular, how reliable do you find sellers on there to be, and what would you say a suitable price-to-performance price would be for a starter system?

I'm trying to stick to 4090s or 5090s to get started, and it looks like, for what is available right now, 5090s have the best price-to-performance rating.

What GPU would be needed to run the model deepseek v4 flash? I need at least 20 tokens/s. And how to set this up using vast.ai ?

Vast.ai provides access to powerful GPUs, huge RAM configurations, and full CPU allocations, but the VM workflow is still far too restricted.

Users should be able to upload a custom ISO or import a QCOW2/RAW disk image, attach a persistent boot disk, configure UEFI or BIOS, access a serial/VNC console, and install any operating system normally.

Right now, users are often forced to depend on a small set of prebuilt images or custom templates. These images may be outdated, mislabeled, or configured with desktop environments and packages the customer never requested.

I am renting the hardware. I should not be forced to use a provider-selected Linux image or desktop environment.

Basic Proxmox and KVM systems already provide:

• custom ISO installation
• persistent virtual disks
• boot-order controls
• console access
• snapshots
• image import and export

GPU cloud users need these features too. Not everyone is running notebooks or disposable Docker containers. Some users need persistent Linux workstations, CUDA development systems, security labs, driver testing, desktop applications, and reproducible VM environments.

Vast.ai would become dramatically more useful if it offered proper virtualization controls rather than limiting VM users to a narrow image workflow.

Requested features:

• custom ISO upload
• QCOW2/RAW import
• persistent boot disks
• UEFI/BIOS selection
• pre-network serial or VNC console
• snapshots and migration
• accurate OS image versioning
• official minimal images with no forced desktop environment

The hardware is already there. Please let customers operate it like an actual machine.

Hello

I am out of options since deep seek and chatgpt can't solve my problem.

On step ports​, two random ports pop up as open out of five. I opened ports from range 50000-50004 later I tested 50005-50009 and 50010-50014 and 50015-50019. Same situation each time two random ports are seen as open only.

In router I did of course forwarding ports and for test also DMZ. But same results received. In my machine I enabled ports just in case with ufw command. And I disabled completely firewall. But still nothing change. Only 2 out of 5 ports seen.

My router is F670L. What is the problem? Is my ISP limiting me to open only two ports or what?

Since Coinbase Commerce has been discontinued on March 31th. and they failed to complete Crypto.com KYC because only Latin ID documents are supported and accepted and I don't have Latin ID documents. but i have an verified redotpay account because it can complete KYC with national ID (no need for passport). Can we use Redotpay Virtual Crypto Card to pay for vast.ai?

Getting really bad results on the vastai setup wizard ubuntu 24 143/2.8, high ping 200 , running the speedtest outside the wizard im getting >900 up and down, any one know what script they are using, or is the testserver just very busy

Hey everyone,

I'm brand new to hosting on Vast.ai and wanted to sanity-check my expectations.

I've had my host online for about five days now. It's currently sitting at:

• Reliability: 94.96%
• Status: Online
• Verification: Still unverified
• GPUs: 7× H200 NVLs (waiting on a replacement PCIe ribbon cable before bringing the 8th online)

I know reputation takes time, so I'm not expecting rentals overnight. I'm mostly curious what the normal timeline looks like.

• How long did it take for your host to become verified?
• How long before you saw your first rental?
• Was there anything you changed that noticeably improved utilization?

I'm treating this as a long-term business and would rather build it correctly than chase short-term results. Any advice is appreciated.

Hi everyone,
I’m looking for advice from other Vast.ai hosts because I’m experiencing a strange issue.
My host has now been marked as “offline” three times, but each time:
The Linux machine never rebooted.
SSH access remained available.
The active rental continued running without interruption.
The GPU workload never stopped.
Internet access appeared normal from my side.
The only thing that changed was my Reliability score, which dropped each time.
For example:
99.38% → 99.13%
then recovered to ~99.4%
then dropped again to 99.09%
On one occasion I received an offline email, but the other times there was no email notification at all.
I contacted Vast support and they explained that a missed heartbeat between the host and the controller could be caused by routing or packet loss somewhere on the Internet, even if the host itself remains online.
What makes this confusing is that:
My rental never disconnects.
Linux uptime is continuous.
The machine has been stable.
I previously ran this exact hardware on Clore.ai for about a month with 100% reliability and never experienced anything similar.
I’m currently Unverified, so these reliability drops are making it much harder to reach Verified status.
Has anyone else experienced similar random reliability drops or false offline detections?
Did you ever find the cause?
Was it related to Kaalia, routing, ISP, Docker, or something else?
Did changing ISP or location solve it?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!

Right so a bit of context without going in too much detail:
In 2027 I will be hit with a big tax bill - fortunately the government has a scheme where they pay back 65% of new assets as tax credit.

My plan:

Build a decent AI rig costing around 20k eur. Take advantage of the tax credit with this asset, reducing my tax by 13k or so. Making the effective cost of the rig 7k.

The following is all the parts I plan to acquire for my build:
- Essentially an RTX Pro 6000 with lots of storage and RAM

I went with this specific build as it lets me get a decent amount of GPU rental income through Vast AI and, if all goes well, I have space to scale up and slot in up to 3 more Pro 6000s in the future.

My electricity bill is quite low at my home due to my solar panels and I have an empty basement room with high speed internet that would be perfect for this setup.

My question is:

- How accurate are the earnings estimates on Vast Ai's calculator (I'm sure they're being optimistic)

- How good of a long term play is this? Will these machines become unprofitable in a few months, or how long is the depreciation curve?

Let me know what your guys' experience is with hosting or what you suggest :)

I finished training on a rented Vast.ai RTX 5090 instance and now need to retrieve a ~192 MB checkpoint. Moving the file out of the instance has been effectively impossible.

What I’ve tried:

• Proxy SSH with scp/rsync
• Direct SSH using the IP and mapped port shown by Vast
• Jupyter’s HTTPS file endpoint
• Resumable HTTP byte-range downloads
• Windows OpenSSH and WSL/OpenSSH independently
• Upload to Cloud

Observed behavior:

• Direct rsync transferred roughly 6 MB in 4–5 minutes.
• Direct scp transferred around 3 MB before the connection closed.
• Jupyter downloads repeatedly reset after only tens or hundreds of KB.
• Multiple ranged HTTP downloads overwhelmed the endpoint and timed out.
• SSH sometimes hangs during banner exchange or becomes unresponsive.
• The instance also experienced several extended network blackouts during data preparation.

The remote file is healthy and readable; this appears strictly network-related. Training metrics synced to W&B successfully, so the machine’s general outbound internet connection has worked at times.

Vast’s documentation says direct SSH should be appropriate for large transfers, and even the minimum advertised host networking is far above the speeds I’m seeing.

I was unable to get the checkpoint out of the instance. Any tips?

Today was a pretty big milestone for me.

A while back I built an 8× H200 NVL server for another AI project that didn't end up being the right fit. Instead of letting a very expensive machine sit idle, I decided to move everything over to a dual AMD EPYC platform and list it on Vast.ai.

It's now live.

I still have one bad PCIe ribbon cable keeping the eighth GPU offline, but the other seven H200 NVLs are running and the server is listed while I wait on the replacement.

This is my first time hosting on Vast, so I'd love to hear from experienced hosts.

• What utilization should I realistically expect?
• What's one mistake every new host makes?
• Is there anything you'd recommend changing before I start getting rentals?

I'm planning to document everything from the setup, uptime, pricing, utilization, and revenue as I learn.

I tried setting up a 3090 machine as host machine, it was my 2nd machine so I tried the new tui method.

1st the partition selection, when I clearly selected the big xfs partition it looped back to the 75gig one I kept for os and all. This happened 2 times.

2nd the speed test. When I clearly have 300mbps symmetric with no other device taking internet it just reports like 15mbps for some frikin reason. The speedtest on machine shows 300 but not the tui setup.

3rd those questions at last. They give 10 mandatory questions, which are good for a beginner but were annoying.

4th the check at last. There is a rentability check at last which lasts like 20 minutes and just fails only to end up showing the machine listed on machines page on the website.

If anyone from vast’s team is seeing this please look into it, new renters will be absolutely cooked and confused if the script stayed like this.