*[DediGPU](https://dedigpu.com/) — Markdown mirror of [https://dedigpu.com/guides/dedicated-gpu-server-vs-gpu-cloud](https://dedigpu.com/guides/dedicated-gpu-server-vs-gpu-cloud) · updated 2026-09-02 · index for LLMs: [llms.txt](https://dedigpu.com/llms.txt) · everything: [llms-full.txt](https://dedigpu.com/llms-full.txt)*

# Dedicated GPU server vs GPU cloud: what the hourly price hides

> The lines that do not appear on an hourly GPU price: storage that keeps billing, egress, idle hours, pre-emption, shared hosts. And when the cloud is still the right call.

*Economics · published 1 August 2026 · updated 2 September 2026 · by DediGPU engineering*

In short:

- A month is 730 hours: the median on-demand H100 costs about $2,460 a month running; our H100 SXM is $1,134 whether it runs or not.
- The hourly price hides storage that keeps billing, egress, idle hours, pre-emption and shared hosts.
- Cloud for bursts and uncertainty; dedicated for anything that runs more than half the hours in a month.

An hourly price looks small and a monthly price looks large, and the two are rarely compared on the same footing. This guide puts them on one: a card that runs for a month, with everything a month of running costs.

## 730 hours

A month is 730 hours. The median on-demand H100 in 2 September 2026 was $3.37 an hour, which is $2,460 a month if the instance runs continuously; the cheapest in-stock offer was $1.73, or $1,263. Our H100 SXM is $1,134 a month, whether it runs or not. The cloud is cheaper for any workload that runs less than 336 hours a month at the median rate, or 655 at the cheapest. Most serving workloads and most multi-week training runs are above both.

## The lines under the hourly price

- **Storage:** Cloud volumes bill whether the instance runs or not, at $0.08 to $0.20 per GB per month. A 2 TB dataset is $160 to $400 a month before compute. On a dedicated server, 1.5 TB of NVMe per H100 is in the price.
- **Egress:** $0.05 to $0.09 per GB at the large clouds. Moving a 500 GB checkpoint out five times a month is $125 to $225. Ours is $0.
- **Idle time:** An instance you forget to stop bills at full rate. A server billed by the month cannot surprise you.
- **Pre-emption:** Spot capacity is cheap because it can vanish mid-run. A dedicated server is yours for the term; the only interruption we allow ourselves is announced maintenance under four hours a month.
- **Shared hosts:** Many cloud GPU instances are virtual machines on hosts shared with other tenants: PCIe bandwidth, CPU and network are contended. A dedicated server has one tenant.
- **Quotas and approval:** Eight H100s at a large cloud is a quota request and a sales call. Here it is a form.

## Side by side

|  | DediGPU | Dedicated GPU hosts | GPU clouds |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| **1× H100, per month** | $1,134 — the cost sheet | $1,230 – $2,099 | $2,460 (median on-demand ×730 h) |
| **1× RTX 4090, per month** | $138 | $274 – $323 | $307 (median on-demand ×730 h) |
| **How the price is set** | published cost, zero margin | cost plus margin, unpublished | market rate, changes weekly |
| **Setup fee** | $0 | $0 – $99 | $0 |
| **Minimum term** | one month, no notice | one to twelve months | none |
| **GPU dedicated to you** | yes, whole server | yes | often shared hosts |
| **Egress** | $0 | metered above a quota | $0.05 – $0.09 per GB |
| **Identity check** | none | ID + card, usually | full KYC, credit card |
| **Payment** | crypto balance | card, wire, PayPal | card |

Dedicated-host figures are the published monthly prices of Latitude.sh, GPU-Mart and HostKey for a single-card server on 2 September 2026; cloud figures are the median on-demand rate tracked by getdeploying.com the same day, times 730 hours.

## When the cloud is right

- **Bursts.** A hyper-parameter sweep that needs 64 GPUs for six hours is a cloud job. Nobody rents 64 cards for a month for that.
- **Uncertainty.** If you do not know whether you need a GPU at all next week, pay by the hour until you do.
- **Managed services.** Notebooks, pipelines, model registries and the people who run them. We rent hardware.
- **Compliance paperwork.** If your customer needs a SOC 2 report from the GPU provider, a crypto-only host with no KYC is not it.

## When dedicated is right

- Anything that runs more than about half the hours in a month.
- Serving, where latency and noisy neighbours matter more than elasticity.
- Large datasets on local NVMe, moved often.
- Teams that want one bill they can predict, paid up front, with no card on file.

The cheapest way to check for your own workload is the [calculator](https://dedigpu.com/pricing#calc): a card, a count, a term, and the number a month of the cloud would have to beat. For an RTX 4090 the number is $139; for an H100, $1,134.