Despite the fact that the OP is in jest, I found myself wondering the same. The best we could come up with at the office was to get some SDHC cards that are har

Despite the fact that the OP is in jest, I found myself wondering the same. The best we could come up with at the office was to get some SDHC cards that are hardware read-only lockable (the spec says they exist [1], but I wasn't able to find any to purchase). On these SDHC cards, you stick a PXE-like implementation that allows it to pull a disk image off another machine in the DC, install it to an attached USB drive, then chainboot to that disk. This setup would allow customers to upload an image which is effectively burned and attached to the hardware during an automated provisioning process. When the node is powered down, the USB drive is wiped by the next provisioning. The customer is expected to set up the image so that it provides ssh (or what have you) on boot. Since the failure state of, say, a kernel panic in this setup is complete data loss, there's no need for KVM or anything. It probably wouldn't be a very competitive service, but as mentioned elsewhere, for $5/month most applications are likely better off with a VPS anyway. -- [1] http://superuser.com/questions/354473/is-the-lock-mechanism-on-an-sd-card-hardware-firmware-or-software-driver-os http://superuser.com/questions/354473/is-the-lock-mechanism-...