

Without that key you won't be able to login. The security will be pretty decent on any of these things. If it's $50 a month and you use it for 4 hours, that comes out to less than $1. However, you can get the most expensive machine and only have it turned on when you're using it and it won't cost very much at all. Of course, that is not going to be as nice as your desktop, so there isn't much point. Digital Ocean's cheapest machine is $5 a month. Most of the machines are affordable enough if you just turn them on and leave them on all month. I would definitely recommend an entire VM. Or you could set up a Windows cloud machine (probably at double the cost of a Linux machine, but it's up to you). If you want, you can get something like xming and just get regular RStudio. If that doesn't seem secure enough for you, you can run R from ssh. There are a lot of different tutorials on how to set up R and RStudio Server. The best way I've found to work with R is using RStudio Server. The virtual machines that I set up with AWS work exactly the same way that the ones I set up with Digital Ocean work. Once you have a VM set up, it's not going to make much of a difference who provides it. The main difference is that Digital Ocean is much cheaper.


Which service would you recommend for statistical computing (with R)? For example, are there any clear difference between the existing services in terms of performance gains, accessibility, and ease of use?.I was wondering if anyone has some experience with cloud computing with R and can provide some insight: From what I gather the three most popular cloud services are AWS, MS Azure and Google Cloud.

If I understand correctly, cloud VM services offer computational power scaled to your needs. This is a somewhat costly upgrade, and I came to think of the possibility of running R sessions in a cloud VM instead. Initially, I was considering upgrading from my current 16GB of RAM to 32GB. I've recently run into memory shortage when trying to run some analyses in R on my laptop.
