Do on-demand Mac OS X cloud services exist, comparable to Amazon's EC2 on-demand instances?
Amazon's EC2 service offers a variety of Linux and Windows OS choices, but I haven't found a service offering a similar "rent by the hour" service for a remote Mac OS X virtual machine. Does such a service exist? (iCloud looks to be just a data storage service, rather than a service allowing remote login, etc.)
Such a virtual machine service would be very useful for testing software in a reproducible, "neutral" location.
Update 1: Just to be clear, I'm referring to services similar to EC2's on-demand or spot instances, where the machine (or virtual machine) is rented per hour, rather than typical web hosting services that involve a monthly subscription. As @Erik has pointed out, there are several good options for that route. As my searches for queries for OS X hosting with terms like "per hour" or "hourly rates" are turning up very little (basically, just labor fees for hourly repairs), I am inclined to believe that this doesn't exist for some reason. If it did, it seems reasonable that such a firm would advertise for precisely these queries.
Update 2: I see that this question is getting a lot of views over time. If someone encounters a change in the situation, i.e. that there is a provider of such services, please post and I will accept that answer instead.
Answer
List last updated on December 1, 2020:
As of November 30, 2020, AWS now has EC2 Mac instances:
We previously used and had good experiences with:
Here are some other sites that I am aware of:
- https://flow.swiss/
- https://hostmyapple.com/ (We used them a long time ago, before MacStadium)
- https://macincloud.com/
- https://macminivault.com/
- https://macweb.com/
- https://virtualmacosx.com/
- https://xcloud.me/
- https://zeromac.com/
http://www.cloud4mac.com/404 as of July, 2014https://www.macminicloud.net/(Redirects to macweb.com)https://xcloud.me/(Redirects to flow.swiss)
When we were with MacStadium, we loved them. We had great connectivity/uptime. When I've needed hands-on support to plug in a Time Machine backup, they've been great. They performed a seamless upgrade to better hardware for us over one weekend (when we could afford a bit of downtime), and that went off without a hitch. Highly recommended. (Not affiliated - just happy).
In April of 2020, we stopped using MacStadium, simply because we no longer needed a Mac server. If I need another Mac host, I would be happy to go back to them.