Finishing a contract for an academic project soon, I'll miss having a unix machine I can log in from anywhere, which has all my scripts and data in it, where I can run stuff for myself.<p>Amazon EC2, slicehost, are marketed as hosting sites. I guess many of you use them as home machines too. Any thoughts?
All of those are clouds, not really meant as an always-on home in the cloud (or at least an expensive option). I'll assume you are looking for low-budget since you mentioned "Academic project."<p>What you are looking for is probably a VPS (can be had for < $10/month at many, many places) or simply setting up an old computer on your home connection. Even if you have a static IP, use DynDNS or similar service to get a static address to connect to.
If you can get by with something really lightweight, Amazon has their new
EC2 micro instance. It's free for the first year (for new AWS customers), then
an on-demand instance runs 2 cents an hour. You can't beat those prices
with a stick.<p>More details about what's included can be found here:
"<a href="http://aws.amazon.com/free/" rel="nofollow">http://aws.amazon.com/free/</a>