Thank you for documenting this! I have two suggestions:

1. Use Tmux to keep multiple persistent shells running through one login. You don’t have to ssh in twice, just learn tmux, and you can switch to different shells. They can even run detached while you’re logged out from ssh — meaning you can work a bit, log out, go to sleep, log in, and continue where you left off.
2. Instead of paying $80 a month for a node with a 320 GB drive, get a cheap $5/month node, and attach a 300 GB block storage drive for $30. It’ll cost a grand total of $35 a month and you shouldn’t feel any performance impact. Since you’ve already got everything setup, you can migrate your /scratch directory to the block storage device, update the docker mounts, and just migrate to the new instance.