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.
This question is related to
macos
amazon-ec2
cloud-hosting
I have tried www.wheresmymac.com they are cheap and they have great bandwith so their is low latency. You need teamviewer to log into the virtual system though
Amazon EC2 cannot offer Mac OS X EC2 instances due to Apple's tight licensing to only allow it to legally run on Apple hardware and the current EC2 infrastructure relies upon virtualized hardware.
Apple Mac image on Amazon EC2?
Can you run OS X on an Amazon EC2 instance?
There are other companies that do provide Mac OS X hosting, presumably on Apple hardware. One example is Go Daddy:
Go Daddy Product Catalog (see Mac® Powered Cloud Servers under Web Hosting)
To find more, search for "Mac OS X hosting" and you'll find more options.
Here are some methods that may help others, though they aren't really services as much as they may be described as "methods that may, after some torture of effort or logic, lead to a claim of on-demand access to Mac OS X" (no doubt I should patent that phrase).
Fundamentally, I am inclined to believe that on-demand (per-hour) hosting does not exist, and @Erik has given information for the shortest feasible services, i.e. monthly hosting.
It seems that one may use EC2 itself, but install OS X on the instance through a lot of elbow grease.
Where this gets tricky is I'm not sure if this will work for a cluster compute instance. In fact, I think this is likely to be a royal pain. A similar approach may work for Rackspace or other cloud services.
I found only this site claiming on-demand Mac hosting, with a Mac Mini. It doesn't look particularly accurate: it offers free on-demand access to a Mini if one pays for a month of bandwidth. That's like free bandwidth if one rents a Mini for a month. That's not really how "on-demand" works.
Update 1: In the end, it seems that nobody offers a comparable service. An outfit called Media Temple claims they will offer the first virtual servers using Parallels, OS X Leopard, and some other stuff (in other words, I wonder if there is some caveat that makes them unique, but, without that caveat, someone else may have a usable offering).
After this search, I think that a counterpart to EC2 does not exist for the OS X operating system. It is extraordinarily unlikely that one would exist, offer a scalable solution, and yet be very difficult to find. One could set it up internally, but there's no reseller/vendor offering on-demand, hourly virtual servers. This may be disappointing, but not surprising - apparently iCloud is running on Amazon and Microsoft systems.
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:
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.
Source: Stackoverflow.com