Do on-demand Mac OS X cloud services exist, comparable to Amazon's EC2 on-demand instances?
MacosAmazon Ec2Cloud HostingMacos Problem Overview
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.
Macos Solutions
Solution 1 - Macos
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/</strike> 404 as of July, 2014https://www.macminicloud.net/</strike> (Redirects to macweb.com)https://xcloud.me/</strike> (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.
Solution 2 - Macos
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.
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.
Solution 3 - Macos
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.
Solution 4 - Macos
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.
Solution 5 - Macos
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