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

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.

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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.

Cherian

And now AWS provides Mac-mini in the cloud - aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/…. See the announcement at techcrunch.com/2020/11/30/aws-brings-the-mac-mini-to-its-cloud – Enki

Answer 1

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.

Revisionist

It is possibly the most appealing site. I'd be quite interested in knowing what you discover. I've seen the site, but wasn't going to include them for several reasons, which you may be able to address if you sign up. These are 1: the pricing is opaque (one has to sign up for a free trial before seeing the pricing plans), 2: it looks like pricing is not based on clock hours but CPU hours, which is appealing, but a little awkward, 3: permanency of data and configurations (a la EBS and AMIs) isn't clear. Nonetheless their $8 daily pass doesn't sound bad. – Cherian

(Continued) FWIW to others: This company's daily pass is the shortest rental period I've yet found for "cloud" Macs. Also note, macincloud.com appears to be different from macincloud.net. – Cherian

David, these are very helpful points. It would be easiest for others if you could revise your answer to include these insights as part of your answer. – Cherian

Interesting comments and thanks for the update. I'm surprised about the bandwidth issue. For EC2, I use X11 compression, and usually never have any problems. Did you use X11 to connect? If so, I wonder if compression is feasible. – Cherian

No, I used Microsoft remote desktop (RDP), default settings. That's what they advertise & document for you to connect with. I don't know if there's an option to use X.11, or VNC. Would need to consult with their customer support. They did have different connection profiles tuned for different bandwidths that helped a bit. It could be that they don't have a high bandwidth pipe and distributed data centers like Amazon to serve customers around the world, hence the slowness, after all, they are using physical Macs, and not virtualized machines that could take advantage of EC2, etc. – Revisionist

Update: as with all business model changes, sadly it looks like the company has removed the nice free trial program. You now have to pay to try. They say you get 1 day free if order the monthly, weekly plan. Or you could go with the pay as you go (with minimum $30 / 30 hr prepay). On the plus side, you can now connect from within the browser and not have to use RDP client, and they now say they support RDP from iOS/Android devices and Macs. – Revisionist

Frankly with the new business model, the pay as you go service isn't bad, if only you didn't have to prepay 30 hrs and login every 60 days. With Amazon, at least it's true pay as you go with no monthly service fee or prepay. But then again with Amazon you get plain default virtual machine images without custom settings unless you pay for monthly storage of a customized image. With MacInCloud, they keep your custom account, and have to maintain it for you, which makes sense why they need to charge, though 30 hr prepay, 60 day login is a bit of a hassle vs a $1-5 monthly fee (which not great 2). – Revisionist

MacInCloud: Was easy to get started but they provide no admin access, which makes installing some things (in my case, Python-like things such as pip) a nightmare. – Monaural

Wow that's expensive! For any moderate use, you'd save money buying a Mac with a high-interest credit card and paying it off over time. – Devondevona

True, owning is typically cheaper & better over time. Except for the case of obsolescence of hardware/product, in which case the rental/service model may manage all that for you, no need to bother with upgrading hardware, OS, every X years as the service provider hopefully does that in timely manner. – Revisionist

As far as I can tell, macincloud pay as you go doesn't allow administrator privileges. I can't actually fathom a situation in which someone wouldn't need administrator privileges. – Hidrosis

This appears to be the now correct answer. Accepting. Thanks and apologies for the delay - have been off SO for a long time. – Cherian

In regards to macincloud, non-root was a deal break for us. Although they didn't have a free trial, they had a $0.99 trail which was cheap enough and long enough to make an educated decision. Their setup seems nice for the use-cases where root is not required. It was nice being able to SSH into a Mac 10 seconds after sending them a dollar. :) They also offer root-enable services, but the pricing is nearly double that of non-root. – Sensationalism

What does timesharing a server mean? – Ahern

Maybe wrong wording, timesharing server here likely is more like users sharing the server. One server, multiple user logins at same time. Or maybe they have multiple machines in cloud cluster, and when you login, they send you to an available unused machine. I don't know the details. – Revisionist

Answer 2

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.

Dubai

Thanks for the suggestions. The first one is deceptive (I mentioned it in my answer, too) - they do on-demand rentals, but one has to do a monthly bandwidth contract. The second is also a monthly cloud service (i.e. not on-demand for hourly usage, like EC2). The third link is opaque - it's not clear what they offer, how they charge, or what their infrastructure is like -- I think they are not yet ready for business. Still, these three results point out that there are vendors blowing smoke. :) I wish someone would actually step forward with a real on-demand cloud. – Cherian

xcloud.me looks like an interesting option for EU companies as they operate out of Suisse. cloud4mac.com results in a 404 ( July 2014 ). – Immigrate

Thanks @webdevotion, removed them. – Dubai

FYI : I've changed the order of the items in the list, so the one that @iterator mentioned as "deceptive" (macminicloud.net) is no longer the first in the list. – Dubai

It's really upsetting that even in 2020 there is no MacOS "EC2-style" provider - with at least hourly billing and API. – Hypercorrection

There's amazon's EC2 that started today, too! – Ennius

Thanks Filip! Updated. @Vitaly, see my edit and Filip's comment. AWS now has EC2 Macs! – Dubai

Answer 3

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.

Ballerina

Thanks for the pointers - I'd seen the SE sites, and was aware that Amazon doesn't offer OS X hosting. In any case, one major difference between EC2 and these other hosting options is that EC2 can be rented per hour, rather than as a dedicated monthly contract. These other options are more akin to reserved instances on EC2, rather than on-demand or spot instances. I'll revise the question to make that clearer. I suspect, though, that nobody has worked out a method for renting per hour, so your pointers are probably the best that can be achieved. – Cherian

Thanks again for the pointers. Barring news from Apple itself, I guess the answer is no, at least for now. – Cherian

GoDaddy appears to have dropped OSX – Exerciser

@Ballerina You can drop Godaddy from your comment as its misleading, Godaddy does not offer MacOs anymore. – Internuncial

Answer 4

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.

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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.

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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.

Cherian

So does your VirtualBox -> EC2 trick actually work? Has anybody done it successfully. I'd rather not sink the time into trying if it doesn't work (especially since this is the accepted answer)... – Pestilential

On @TooTallNate's comment, even if possible, I wonder if that's legally allowed (for commercial use and personal use). For the standard Mac OS, you are allowed to run virtualized instances but they're allowed on or meant to be run on the same host machine as the non-virtualized instance. – Revisionist

Answer 5

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

Loralorain

this address does not exist – Vinia