Is there a good alternative to Colab you can just pay for, that's good for hobbyist individuals? Especially one that gives you shell access?
I tried using PaperSpace for a while but it works maybe 1 in 3 times I tried to use it, they (temporarily) banned me for no reason, they send me "itemized" bills with empty line items, and their support was no help.
What I settled on is I have a computer with a lower-end nvidia gpu that lets me debug code and do basic stuff but is impractical for training any large model or with lots of data (although since the incremental cost is only the electricity, you can often still get far by training overnight or when you're doing something else). And then I use AWS more deliberately once I've figured out exactly what I want to run. Otherwise, you're reserving a cloud GPU for all the setup and debugging.
If getting a gpu is not practical, I'd try one of the K80s or other cheaper GPUs on AWS for all your debugging and then port to the more expensive instances only if you need them. Doing this as a hobbyist will be relatively inexpensive. I think a lot of the cost incurred as a hobbyist comes from reserving a gpu when you don't actually need it.
Last time I checked it wasn't available outside the US and Canada at all, and didn't have a terminal, but I just checked and both of those seem to have changed.
I'm also not a fan of having to upload files to Google Drive and then write special code to import them. It means my code isn't portable to run locally or anywhere else and it's just extra effort. I just want normal file access and to write scripts like I normally would.
Still, I was spurred to ask the question because some people are categorically opposed to anything Google due to privacy issues.
At saturncloud.io we focus on helping data science teams move to the cloud (either in your AWS account or ours). One component we provide is hosted jupyter lab (along with SSH access so you can use PyCharm/VSCode or anything else.
Hobbyists often use our free tier (30 hrs of GPU per month) or pay for more compute ($0.69/hour) to do a variety of GPU workloads.
We do prohibit things like DDOS attacks and cryptocurrency mining.
Studio Lab doesn't have any GPU instances available in practice, unfortunately. They're permanently out of resources at the moment. The other two options are pretty expensive.
PaperSpace has improved a lot in the last few months. I've been using them nearly exclusively recently and have had zero issues.
They provide persistent storage and access to the full JupyterLab or Jupyter Notebook software, unlike Colab. I find this makes life far easier, since all my normal terminal workflows work fine.
Yes, I like them (and I feel like I've seen some other similar services but haven't looked into them closely). Its easy to start and stop interactive instances (easier than AWS imo) for doing stuff in notebooks, and to run training jobs on more powerful GPUs when you need to, because you're only paying for it when you're actually using it.
OVH actually has a (distantly) similar service (much less user friendly than grid and without the whole "grid" feature, but that matters less for hobbyists if you're not doing a lot of parallel runs). I liked the OVH one a lot in principle, but in practice found it too buggy to use properly (and they don't have customer support). For a budget project it could be worth trying.
I've migrated several notebooks from Colab to JupyterLab when playing around with various generative art models; it's a drop-in replacement and runs on your local machine's hardware.
I did have to do some fiddling to install a bunch of Nvidia crap on my local machine, however; blame CUDA.
You don't seem to offer viable GPU options - or maybe the pricing page is not up to date?
The GPU add-on cost is about 7.50$ per hour for a 12 GB K80 (which has 24GB, so you share it? Also, it's from 8? years ago?).
As an add-on, other vendors would give you V100s (possibly multiple ones).
I am pretty sure that's not actually what you are offering, because that would be ridiculous. So you probably want to update your pricing page ;-)
I tried using PaperSpace for a while but it works maybe 1 in 3 times I tried to use it, they (temporarily) banned me for no reason, they send me "itemized" bills with empty line items, and their support was no help.