I'm the teaching assistant for a CS class in the spring and wanted to investigate low cost cloud options for hosting smallish footprint (512 MB or 1 GB ram) linux instances that students can telnet into. Ideally it would support remote desktop access for KDE or a similar environment.
The tooling on the boxes would be the gcc and java compilers, with Eclipse if GUI access is possible. Cost is the main consideration though reliability is nice too...thanks!