The headline price of an RTX 4090 24GB dedicated server sits around £500-650 per month, but that number only matters in context. The honest comparison versus cloud GPU and per-token APIs has to include bandwidth, storage, IPv4, monitoring, on-call engineering and the hidden cost of cloud price drift. This article breaks down what you actually get for that monthly fee on GigaGPU dedicated hosting, what an equivalent workload costs on hourly cloud GPUs, and where the breakeven sits for typical SaaS volumes.
Contents
- What is included in the monthly fee
- Effective hourly rate
- Cloud-GPU equivalents
- Hidden costs the cloud quote ignores
- Bandwidth and egress
- Volume tables: tokens and images
- 12-month total cost of ownership
- Production gotchas
What is included in the monthly fee
| Component | Spec | Cloud equivalent line item |
|---|---|---|
| GPU | 1x RTX 4090 24GB GDDR6X | g5/g6 family on AWS |
| CPU | 16-32 cores AMD EPYC or Intel Xeon | vCPU billed separately on hyperscaler |
| RAM | 64-128 GB DDR4/5 | Bundled into instance type |
| NVMe | 2 TB | EBS gp3 at $80/TB/month |
| Bandwidth | 1 Gbps unmetered (UK egress) | $50-90 per TB egress |
| IPv4 | 1 dedicated, persistent | $3-12/month elastic IP |
| Power and cooling | Included | Included |
| Remote hands | Included (24/7) | $100+/month support contract |
| SLA | 99.9% | 99.5-99.99% by tier |
You get the entire 4090 to yourself with no oversubscription, no noisy neighbours and no data-egress meter ticking. Compare with the spec-matched alternatives in vs RunPod pricing and vs Lambda Labs.
Effective hourly rate
730 hours in an average month, so:
| Monthly | Hourly equivalent (£) | Hourly equivalent ($) |
|---|---|---|
| £500 | £0.69 | $0.87 |
| £550 | £0.75 | $0.95 |
| £600 | £0.82 | $1.04 |
| £650 | £0.89 | $1.13 |
The dedicated price scales linearly with no spot-eviction risk and no surprise overage line items. Cloud rates compare like-for-like only when you exclude egress and storage from the comparison; once you include them, dedicated wins by 60-70% for any 24/7 workload.
Cloud-GPU equivalents
| Provider | SKU | On-demand $/hr | Monthly (730h) | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AWS EC2 | g6.4xlarge (L4 24 GB) | $1.32 | $964 | Slower than 4090; egress extra |
| AWS EC2 | g5.4xlarge (A10G 24 GB) | $1.62 | $1,183 | Older Ampere; egress extra |
| GCP | g2-standard-8 (L4 24 GB) | $0.86 | $628 | Egress $0.12/GB after 200 GB |
| RunPod community | RTX 4090 | $0.34 | $248 | Shared host, evictable |
| RunPod secure | RTX 4090 | $0.69 | $504 | Dedicated, no SLA |
| Lambda Labs | RTX 4090 (when available) | $0.50 | $365 | Sporadic capacity, billed per second |
| Vast.ai | RTX 4090 | $0.30-0.60 | $219-438 | Marketplace, variable reliability |
| Together AI serverless | n/a (per-token) | n/a | n/a | $0.20-0.88/M tokens |
| GigaGPU | RTX 4090 dedicated | ~$0.87-1.13 | $640-820 | UK SLA, unmetered bandwidth |
Hyperscalers don’t sell a 4090 directly: the L4 and A10G are their nearest 24 GB alternatives, both noticeably slower than the Ada gaming part. Lambda’s $0.50/h is enviable but capacity is sporadic and they bill per-second on shared boxes. RunPod community at $0.34 looks unbeatable until you hit a spot eviction during a fine-tune. The GigaGPU monthly is dedicated hardware with full root, no spot eviction and unmetered bandwidth.
Hidden costs the cloud quote ignores
Cloud headline rates ignore the lines that quietly inflate the bill. Here is what actually gets billed against a real production deployment:
| Line item | Typical cloud charge | GigaGPU dedicated |
|---|---|---|
| Egress (per TB) | $50-90 | £0 (1 Gbps unmetered) |
| Block storage 2 TB SSD | $200-400/mo | included |
| Snapshot storage | $0.05/GB/mo | BYO |
| Static IPv4 | $3-12/mo | included |
| Premium support | $100+/mo | included |
| NAT gateway / load balancer | $25-75/mo | BYO |
| Engineer time managing autoscaling | ~£3,000/year | ~£500/year |
| On-call response to spot eviction | Variable, weekends | None |
| Cost-management tooling | $50-200/mo | None needed |
Engineer time is the line everyone forgets. A senior infra engineer at £100k loaded cost is roughly £400/day. One day of cloud cost-firefighting per month is £4,800/year, the price of an entire dedicated server.
Bandwidth and egress
An inference endpoint streaming Llama 3 70B AWQ at 24 t/s outputs roughly 1.2 KB/s per stream. With 16 concurrent streams and 24/7 uptime that is ~50 GB/month, trivial. Add image generation (~150 KB per SDXL output, 2,000/hour = 290 GB/day = 8.7 TB/month) and AWS would be charging $400-700/month in egress alone. The unmetered 1 Gbps line on dedicated hosting absorbs all of it, including bursty Whisper or video-pipeline workloads from the NVENC/NVDEC pipeline.
Volume tables: tokens and images
What does £550-650/month buy you in actual production volume? Capacity per workload:
| Workload | Aggregate t/s or img/s | 10 M tokens / 10k images | 100 M / 100k | 1 B / 1M | Capacity ceiling |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Llama 3 8B FP8 | 1,100 t/s | 2.5 hours | 25 hours | 10 days | ~2.85 B/month |
| Mistral 7B FP8 | 1,200 t/s | 2.3 hours | 23 hours | 9.6 days | ~3.1 B/month |
| Qwen 14B AWQ | 720 t/s | 3.9 hours | 39 hours | 16 days | ~1.87 B/month |
| Qwen 32B AWQ | 280 t/s | 10 hours | 4.1 days | 41 days | ~654 M/month |
| Llama 70B INT4 | 80 t/s | 1.5 days | 14.5 days | 145 days (capped) | ~187 M/month |
| SDXL images | 0.77 img/s | 3.6 hours | 36 hours | 15 days | ~2 M images/month |
| FLUX schnell FP8 | 0.71 img/s | 3.9 hours | 39 hours | 16.3 days | ~1.8 M images/month |
Effective $/M token at $700/month, 70% utilisation:
| Workload | Tokens/month @ 70% | $/M token | Closest API peer | API blended $/M |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Llama 3 8B FP8 | 2.0 B | $0.35 | GPT-4o-mini | $0.30 |
| Qwen 14B AWQ | 1.31 B | $0.53 | Haiku | $0.58 |
| Qwen 32B AWQ | 458 M | $1.53 | GPT-4o / Sonnet | $5-7 |
| Llama 70B INT4 | 131 M | $5.34 | GPT-4o | $5.00 |
12-month total cost of ownership
| Scenario, 12 months | AWS g5.4xlarge | RunPod 4090 secure | GigaGPU 4090 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Compute | $14,196 | $6,048 | ~$8,400 |
| Storage 2 TB | $2,400 | $600 | included |
| Egress 5 TB/mo | $5,400 | $0 | included |
| IP + extras | $144 | $0 | included |
| Engineer ops | £10,200 | £4,000 | £2,800 |
| Total (USD equiv) | ~$35,000 | ~$11,700 | ~$11,950 |
For 24/7 production workloads dedicated 4090 hosting beats hyperscaler L4/A10G by 60-70% and matches the cheapest container-style providers while giving you full root, dedicated hardware and a UK SLA. For the deeper ROI walkthrough see the dedicated 12-month ROI analysis.
Production gotchas
- Cloud spot evictions: RunPod community and AWS spot save 60-70% on headline rate but evict mid-job. A 12-hour fine-tune that loses an hour to eviction is no saving.
- Egress meters surprise you: A media-heavy SDXL workload that ships 8 TB/month of PNGs costs $400-700/month on AWS. The first month’s bill is when you find out.
- FX volatility: GBP-denominated dedicated insulates you from USD swings; cloud rates vary 5-15%/year with FX.
- Cost monitoring overhead: cloud requires Cost Explorer, budgets, alerts and an engineer who reads them. Dedicated is one invoice.
- Underutilised reserved instances: a year-long AWS RI commitment to save 30% locks you in if your workload changes; dedicated is monthly.
- Latency from US-east clouds to UK clients: 90-110 ms round-trip versus <15 ms from a UK datacentre. For chat UX this is the difference between snappy and sluggish.
- Compliance overhead: GDPR, NHS DSPT, FCA all easier with dedicated UK hardware than with multi-region cloud.
Verdict
For 24/7 production workloads above 100 M tokens or 100k images per month, dedicated 4090 hosting at £500-650/month is the cheapest credible option in the UK. The headline rate looks similar to RunPod secure but the included bandwidth, storage, IPv4 and remote hands save another £150-300/month versus cloud comparables. Spend an evening with the break-even calculator and the ROI analysis before committing, but for any sustained workload the answer is dedicated.
See also: vs RunPod pricing, vs Lambda Labs, vs Together AI, 12-month ROI, vs OpenAI API, vs Anthropic API, break-even calculator, Llama 70B cost, Qwen 32B cost.
