Last week, like many of you, we learned that our friends over at FloydHub are shutting down their operations. Upon learning this, we at GPULab were taken back by the news, and we couldn’t help but feel a bit nostalgic and sorry to see them go. FloydHub was one of our main inspirations here at GPULab when we set out to make a more straightforward and affordable GPU solution for data scientists.
As mentioned on their website, FloydHub is shutting down the bulk of its operations on August 20th, 2021 after which all services and data will become permanently inaccessible.
It appears that the company has been suffering from significant financial pressures for some time, which led to this decision, according to a blog post by FloydHub founder Neil Lawrence:
“We had some great initial hiring success, but then our team rapidly grew and we hit some critical scaling issues that we couldn’t overcome. We’re a young company still learning how to scale multi-million dollar businesses.” Lawrence talked about more hiring and capital stumbles and roadblocks they experienced over the last year or so. But, ultimately, they couldn’t match the steep salaries in London for the top quality sales and developers they needed.
If you are a current data scientist and a FloydHub user, we would like to welcome you to GPULab! Unlike FloydHub, we have always planned to keep our product offerings small and laser-focused on providing a turnkey JupyterLab Notebook environment atop a feature-packed Ubuntu Linux operating system. In addition, we have never planned to take outside investors, so our platform, as you see it today, is how it will remain for the foreseeable future.
If you haven’t yet used GPULab, you can take it for a spin with one of our daily, weekly, or monthly rates. GPULab focuses on providing unlimited access to teams and individuals with tight budgets and projects suited to entry-level GPU. However, if you are coming from FloydHub and need something more, contact us for enterprise pricing and solutions with access to NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs.
As part of our continued mission to make GPU computing more accessible, we will extend our discounted rates of all our plans (including a $39.95/month option) for the rest of the year. We hope that you enjoy using our platform as much as we’ve enjoyed building it. If you have any feedback or comments, please let us know!