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.
