I was looking for a VM with a GPU to train my model. I was going to use Google Cloud but unfortunately they don’t do business with people from my country so I had to look elsewhere.

That’s when I remembered of paperspace which looked pretty nice. They even have a separate option for ml which allows you send calculations to the cloud and launch notebooks.

But the system wouldn’t accept my card. It simply said “Card is declined”. I reached support and they said that’s probably because their system cannot determine my ip because of VPN or firewall and that I need to turn that off to add card info. Pretty strange thing to ask for IP to simply add payment info but that worked.

I quickly understood that I’m not comfortable with this Gradient service and that I’d like to operate from PyCharm, using vm as a remote interpreter via ssh.

So I tried to rent a regular VM but all the options were locked saying that I need to send a request, describing reasons and ways in which I want to use it. Strange, but I send a request, saying that thing about using PyCharm. Waited a day, no response and sent one more request.

Later that day I get an email from their security staff saying that my account rated highly on their risk matrix and was flagged as suspicious and that I must send them:

• a photo of my ID with name matching the card
• contact information
• company or personal website
• link to github or social media accounts
• detailed description of what I’m going to do with the service

And if I don’t do it in 24 hours they will ban me forever.

tl;dr accused me of being suspicious and potentially fraudulent and asked all kinds of personal info to unblock me

Well, imo they should balance their false positive rate and improve customer service greatly.

What are other good alternatives for VMs for machine learning? What do you use?