Do on-demand Mac OS X cloud services exist comparable to Amazon s EC2 on-demand instances

Question

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

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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

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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

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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    This article on Lifehacker com gives instructions for setting up OSX under Virtual Box and depends on hardware virtualization   It seems that the Cluster Compute instances  and Cluster GPU  but ignore these  are the only ones supporting hardware virtualization  This article gives instructions for transferring a VirtualBox image to EC2    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

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I just came across this tonight  Can t say if they are legit  how long in business  and whether they ll be around long  but seems interesting  I may give them a try  and will post update if I do   Per the website  they say they offer hourly pay-as-you-go and weekly monthly plans  plus there s a free trial   http   www macincloud com  Per  Iterator  posting update on my findings for this service  moving out from my comments   I did the trial evaluation  The trial can be misleading on how the trial works  You may need to signup to see prices but the trial so far  per the trial software download  doesn t appear to be time limited  It s just feature restricted  You signup to get your own account  but you actually use a generic trial login account to do the trial  not your own account  Your own account is used when you actually pay for the service  The trial limits what you can do  install  save  etc  but good enough to give you an idea of how things work  So it doesn t hurt to signup to evaluate and not pay anything   Persistence of data is offered via saving files to DropBox  pre-installed  you just need login configure   etc  There is no concept of AMIs  EBS  or some VM image  Their service is actually like a shared website hosting solution  where users timeshare a Mac machine  like timesharing a Unix Linux server   and I think they limit or periodically purge what you put on the machine  or perhaps rather they don t backup your files  hence use of DropBox to do the backup  One should contact them to clarify this if desired   They have various pricing options  as you mention the all day pass  monthly plans at  20  and their is a pay as you go plan at  1 hr  I d probably go with pay as you go based on my usage  The pay as you go is based on prepaid credits  1 credit   1 hour  billed at 30 credit increments   One caveat is that you need to periodically use the plan at least once every 60 days for the pay as you go plan or else you lose unused credits  So that s like minimum of spending 1 credit  1 hour every 60 days   One last comment for now  from my evaluation  you ll need high bandwidth to use the service effectively  It s usable over 1 5 Mbps DSL but kind of slow in response  You d want to use it from a corporate network with Gbps bandwidth for optimal use  Or at least a higher speed cable DSL broadband connection  On my last test  3Mbps seemed sufficient on the low bandwidth profile  they have multiple bandwidth connection profiles  low  medium  high  optimized for some bandwidth ranges   I didn t test on the higher ones  Your mileage may vary

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List last updated on December 1  2020  As of November 30  2020  AWS now has EC2 Mac instances   https   aws amazon com ec2 instance-types mac   We previously used and had good experiences with   https   MacStadium com   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  2014 https   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

[macos] Do on-demand Mac OS X cloud services exist, comparable to Amazon's EC2 on-demand instances?

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