Image & video · 7 min read
Run ComfyUI on a rented GPU server: setup, checkpoints, secure access
Order a server with the ComfyUI template, reach it safely through an SSH tunnel, bring your checkpoints, add custom nodes, and keep it running for months.
In short
- Order an RTX 5090 or 4090 with the ComfyUI template; it listens on port 8188 with no login, so reach it through an SSH tunnel.
- Checkpoints are not bundled: pull them from Hugging Face onto the local NVMe; egress is free.
- ComfyUI runs as a systemd service and survives reboots; sync outputs out on a cron, there are no backups.
ComfyUI on a rented card is the cheapest way to run Flux, SDXL and the video models without buying a workstation, and the template does the install. What remains is reaching it safely and getting your models onto it.
1. Order
An RTX 5090 (32 GB, $163) is the sweet spot for Flux and video; an RTX 4090 ($139) is enough for SDXL and Flux at FP8. Pick Ubuntu 24.04 and the ComfyUI template. It installs ComfyUI, ComfyUI-Manager and the Flux and SDXL loaders, on port 8188, with no checkpoints bundled.
2. Reach it through a tunnel, not the open port
The port is public at first boot and ComfyUI has no login. Do not expose it. Tunnel instead:
ssh -N -L 8188:localhost:8188 [email protected]
# then open http://localhost:8188 on your machine# and close the port to the world
ufw default deny incoming && ufw allow 22 && ufw enableFor a shared team, put Caddy in front with basic auth and TLS on a hostname you own; egress is free, so the traffic costs nothing.
3. Bring your checkpoints
cd /opt/dedigpu/comfyui/models
# Hugging Face, resumable
pip install -U huggingface_hub
huggingface-cli download black-forest-labs/FLUX.1-dev --local-dir checkpoints/flux1-dev --include "*.safetensors"
# or from your machine
scp my-model.safetensors [email protected]:/opt/dedigpu/comfyui/models/checkpoints/The NVMe is local and fast (400 GB on the 5090 server); a Flux checkpoint loads in a couple of seconds after the first run.
4. Custom nodes
ComfyUI-Manager is installed: Manager → Install custom nodes in the UI, or on the shell:
cd /opt/dedigpu/comfyui/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/kijai/ComfyUI-WanVideoWrapper
systemctl restart comfyui5. Keep it running
ComfyUI runs as a systemd service and comes back after a reboot. Logs and control:
systemctl status comfyui
journalctl -u comfyui -f
nano /opt/dedigpu/comfyui/env # extra arguments, e.g. --fp8_e4m3fn-unet --highvramOutputs land in /opt/dedigpu/comfyui/output; sync them out with rclone or rsync on a cron, because the server keeps no backups.
6. What it costs
The 5090 server is $163 a month, $146.70 on a 12-month term; there is no per-image cost, no egress and no idle charge. At a thousand Flux images a day that is under a cent per image with the card busy a third of the time.
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