For a live client demo next week, I would suggest going with Lambda Labs over RunPod, even if the hourly rate looks slightly higher. RunPods community cloud is highly variable, and you risk the host going offline mid-demo, which would be disastrous. Make sure to keep a few things in mind before you deploy:

• Choose an NVIDIA A100 SXM4 80GB instance if available, as DeepSeek V4 Pro requires significant VRAM.
• Factor in the cost of persistent storage volume, which keeps ticking even when the GPU is stopped.
• Test your setup at least three days prior, as Lambda Labs GPU availability can be extremely tight during peak hours. If you cannot find an A100 on Lambda, you might want to consider spinning up an NVIDIA H100 PCIe 80GB on RunPod secure cloud instead of their community pool, but watch that 200 dollar budget closely as the costs scale rapidly.

To add to the point above: if you do choose Lambda, I would suggest spinning up a NVIDIA A100 80GB SXM4 instance. Just be careful with your budget. You might want to consider writing a quick shutdown script, because those hourly rates will drain your 200 dollars super fast if you accidentally leave it running overnight.

Regarding what #1 said about "For a live client demo next week, I..."

• I'm satisfied with dedicated nodes. Shared ones throttled me once mid-inference and it was a total disaster.

Seconded!

Honestly, everyone keeps talking about the big names, but I feel like people overlook the absolute headache of managing your own environment when you are on a tight deadline. Ive tried many cloud providers over the years, and the biggest rookie mistake is underestimating how fast your budget vanishes when you forget to wipe your storage or spin down a node. Even if you get the instance running, you gotta deal with the networking latency, which is a nightmare for live demos. In my experience, dont even bother with the fancy specialized clouds if your setup script isnt rock solid already. I once tried to save a few bucks by going with a cheaper provider for a similar demo, and I spent the whole night just debugging driver compatibility instead of actually prepping the model. Just keep an eye on your usage logs like a hawk, seriously. If you arent careful, you will wake up to a zeroed-out account before you even get to show the client anything.

Good to know!