Welcome to the Vast.ai Host Wiki — a community-driven knowledge base for current and aspiring Vast.ai providers. Whether you're spinning up your first machine or optimizing a high-performance GPU rig, this wiki is here to be a resource for you. This wiki will not have all the answers, and every machine and network is different, but it can be helpful for common topics.
This platform is designed to help hosts:
🧠 Contributions Welcome!
This wiki is built by hosts, for hosts. If you have guides, fixes, or tweaks that others might find helpful, please consider contributing or suggesting edits.
Before diving into setup or configuration, it helps to understand how Vast.ai works under the hood. This section covers the core concepts every host should know:
Offers vs Instances
Understand the difference between what you advertise (offers) and what clients rent (instances).
Market-Based Pricing
Vast.ai uses a spot-market-like model. Learn how your pricing, availability, and performance impact visibility and rentals.
Virtualized Environments
Vast.ai clients runs almost all workloads inside Docker containers. Virtual machines are also possible, but come with caveats.
Reliability
Your uptime affects your visibility and ranking. This section explains how to stay in good standing.
Operating Considerations
Requirements for hardware, power, and network.
Verification
What does "Verified" mean and how do I get verified?
Tip: Understanding these concepts early will save you hours of trial-and-error down the line.
Learn how to prepare your system to host on Vast.ai:
Understand how to use the web dashboard:
For power users and automation:
Common issues and how to fix them:
Quick answers to common questions: