Another fun possibility is to rent instances on the Amazon cloud.
Prices run as low as $428 /year for a reserved instance or can be billed by the hour if your computing demands change frequently. If you build a good AMI image, you can automatically create and destroy instances as needed for load handling.
Of course if you “brick” an instance with valuable data on it, you’re very hosed. There’s no option to drive/fly to the data center to hook up a monitor and keyboard to the thing for the purposes of stepping past a boot time kernel panic. (this has been my headache this week)