AWS / GCP / Azure don't make a lot of sense if you're looking for cheap compute and don't need the rest of the cloud. Take a look at dedicated servers at Hetzn

AWS / GCP / Azure don't make a lot of sense if you're looking for cheap compute and don't need the rest of the cloud. Take a look at dedicated servers at Hetzner. They're very cheap, have enough bandwidth to transfer the things you calculate into and out of there (at no extra cost, unlike the three big cloud providers), and come with some serious CPU power if you pick the right model. You can even email their support staff to get you a couple of machines in the same rack so you get fast network between them. And contracts are month to month so at the end of the project you can easily cancel. Edit: but do note that these are consumer type machines, no dual power supply, no ECC etc. That's why the cost is low. Threat them like a bit more durable version of spot instances but definitely not datacenter level stuff.