So here's my problem.

My Dad runs a company that does some rather computationally expensive stuff. This is not supercomputer level stuff, but it does take several hours to run the average job on his Core i7 desktop.

He asked me to look into a way to have his customers use the code on an hourly basis, namely via a server. Ideally he'd be able to buy a box for about $1000, and hook it right up to our home connection. Unfortunately, the data that needs to be both sent and received is on the order of several hundred megs. We live in a rural area, and the fastest connection offered is 1.5Mbit/s. Download. It's like .3Mbit/s upload.

Not workable.

What are the options for this kind of thing? Ideally, we'd have about 2GB of ram, 300-500GB of storage, and a nice dual core, and it has to run some flavor of Linux.

Any suggestions? Thanks in advance

EDIT: Also, ideally the monthly price would be < $100 per month.