Where can i rent a remote desktop computer?

[Daniel Alexandre]

I have been using Teamviewer app on my ipad to access my PC at home, and do whatever I want to do that a PC can and Ipad doesn't.

It isn't a good solution for things like media streaming (youtube, etc.) but for everything else it is great.

So, I was thinking, wouldn't it be great if I could just rent a PC for such and not having to have my PC always on. Right,

so I found this discussion of a forum: 

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1002390

and ended up giving a try for Amazon Web Services (EC2).

But I'm finding this Amazon Web Services ultra complicated and so far have not been able to do anything useful with it.

Anyway, it seems that if you get past that initial shock you will actually have lots of free storage and the kind of remote access I mentioned and am looking for.

Any tips, ideas?

It seems some hosting plans could enable me as well to do something of this sort.

Anyway, have never done that and am not sure how cheap that solution would get.

Kind regards,

Daniel Alex

[Jim MacArthur]

It depends on what operating system you want to use on your PC, and what sort of tasks you want to do with it. If you use some variant of Linux, there are plenty of options. I rent a virtual machine from linode.com which I'm very pleased with.

Jim

[Philip Norman]

I've not used it myself, but was impressed with the idea of Mac in the Cloud - http://www.macincloud.com

Phil

[Yuan]

would a viable option be to use your current desktop computer on wake-
on-lan? I also have to regularly remote-access my desktop, and I
don't want to keep it switched on all the time, so I use wke-on-lan to
wake up the computer when I need to access it.

Actually, the computer is on WiFi, which doesn't have WoL
functionality, so I've attached a wifi-capable microcontroller to the
computer, and have that serve a (password-protected) web interface
that I can access remotely to wake up the computer.

[Daniel Alexandre]

Hi Philip and all,

I have been giving a try to "macincloud". It is definitely interesting but has some serious limitations that completely piss me off. You cannot install the software you want. You have to ask them "please" to ask for something it is no installed and usually they will only install open source that doesn't consume much resources. For instance, I asked them to install "Flash Media Live Encoder" (FMLE 3.2 for Mac), and they told me they would not do it because, according to them, it would demand tremendous bandwidth and would cause users to be drop offline. 

And you don't even have a Torrent client... They find that dodgy, and won't let you use anything of that sort. So in the end, is not really like having your own mac whenever you want and always there for you...

They have a very good speed connection. Just doing the speedtest and am getting Download Speed: 85Mb/s and Upload 39Mb/s. Well, in that you could not ask for more, could you?

Also, for iPad we are forced to use an app called PocketCloud. We have no choice of using other VCN client, like TeamViewer, which I'm much more used to. But this can be just me, some people say PocketCloud is great. I'm just not used to it and have a lot of difficulty, in terms of interaction, with it. While on the other hand I find TeamViewer app for iPad just great and much better in terms of interaction, imho. But, as I said, that may be just me...

Anyways, they have very good prices and it is really cool to have a mac as such.

In the FAQ they state:

"- Am I renting a real Mac?

Absolutely! We use only authentic Mac computers made by Apple. We do not use any virtualization or sandbox technology to synthesize the Mac experience."

I have some difficulty believing that but that's what they say...

Ah, also for PC, you have to use a log file, which I find also annoying. They say it is to make things simpler. But I'd rather like to log in directly from the browser on the web page, or something, instead of having to use some files they sent by email.

It would be great to see some competitors enter the field. I also gave

it a try for Amazon Web Services, but found it too complicated. Promising and with great potential, sure, but overwhelming in terms of complication. Again, that may be just me... 

www.hvdi.com, that Matt mentions - and is working for - seems really nice but I'm afraid is not for my pocket at the moment. 

--Dan Alex

[Andrew V.]

I've been using http://rentremotedesktop.com/ which basically provides you a PC that can be accessed remotely, not a Mac though. It's quite easy to connect to it with free iOS Remote Desktop app or a built-in Microsoft Client.

[Yvan Janssens]

Hi Andrew,

For the money they charge, you can just as well rent a dedicated server at OVH [1], in addition to having your data stored in Europe. You will have to take care of your own Windows license, or pay the premium, as well as install updates.

Y.

[1] https://www.kimsufi.com/uk/

2016-02-26 15:03 GMT+00:00 Andrew V. <andrey.v...@gmail.com>:

I've been using http://rentremotedesktop.com/ which basically provides you a PC that can be accessed remotely, not a Mac though. It's quite easy to connect to it with free iOS Remote Desktop app or a built-in Microsoft Client.

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Kind regards,

Yvan Janssens

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[JJ]

Everyone likes to knock Microsoft but Azure might be worth a look. There's a 30 day free trial and you only pay when your machine is spun up. And if you're cheeky you can start a new trial from a different email address every month.

Azure is a huge and multi-faceted service but I could do a brief introduction to Azure demo for a few people if there was demand.

JJ