You signup to get your own account, but you actually use a generic trial login account to do the trial, not your own account. 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. The trial can be misleading on how the trial works. Per posting update on my findings for this service, moving out from my comments:

Per the website, they say they offer hourly pay-as-you-go and weekly/monthly plans, plus there's a free trial. I may give them a try, and will post update if I do. Can't say if they are legit, how long in business, and whether they'll be around long, but seems interesting. If I need another Mac host, I would be happy to go back to them. In April of 2020, we stopped using MacStadium, simply because we no longer needed a Mac server.

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. When I've needed hands-on support to plug in a Time Machine backup, they've been great. When we were with MacStadium, we loved them.

(We used them a long time ago, before MacStadium).

Here are some other sites that I am aware of: We previously used and had good experiences with: that there is a provider of such services, please post and I will accept that answer instead.Īs of November 30, 2020, AWS now has EC2 Mac instances:

If someone encounters a change in the situation, i.e. Update 2: I see that this question is getting a lot of views over time. If it did, it seems reasonable that such a firm would advertise for precisely these queries. 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. As has pointed out, there are several good options for that route. 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. Such a virtual machine service would be very useful for testing software in a reproducible, 'neutral' location. Does such a service exist? (iCloud looks to be just a data storage service, rather than a service allowing remote login, etc.) 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.

Virtual macos machine