Online render farm is growing increasingly strong nowadays. Many people are skeptical about many problems in using this service, but I think it is completely reliable and helpful. Here I will outline a few factors that I think will influence your decision.
Immediate access to resources. When you submit a project for rendering to a farm, it will get distributed to their server pool. This means that, for the duration of the rendering, you get to use their infrastructure, without having to purchase all those servers. A typical server in a render farm costs over $4,500. If your animation renders on 20 servers, you are accessing hardware worth over $90,000. And if your workload has periods of time when you need lots of resources for a short time (for instance when you work 3 months on animation and then need to render it), it may just be the optimal solution.
NDA -Non-Disclosure Agreements: Most of the render farms will have confidentiality agreements so if you are still worried about your project being exposed then you can rest assured.
Economical and practical: Instead of having to think and spend a ton of money to buy hardware and install to serve the rendering, you can completely use the render farm to meet the deadlines at a much less cost than the investment in your own system. Because you are already rendering on the server so you can meet the deadline while still being able to do other things on your personal computer. It’s convenient, right.
Easy to use: You just need a computer connected to the internet and then send your projects to the server. As with every web application or software, you need to learn how to use a farm. That typically includes preparing your files (packing up textures, media files, scenes, etc) and uploading them to the farm. The process may vary because every farm has its own interface. But don’t worry because most of the render farms have very detailed instructions and have supporters ready to help you if you have any trouble using them. The good news is that newer render farms are making this process very easy to understand, so they can be used by people that are not tech-savvy.
Fast: Having all that hardware at your disposal means that the rendering will be significantly faster. One individual server from a farm is faster than the average home computer, and a farm can allocate hundreds of them if needed. So your rendering speed may just go hypersonic. Of course, you pay for that, but if you need it fast, you can get it.
Avoid workload spikes: A farm typically has a lot of available machines, so allocating 10 or 100 to a project is pretty much the same thing. Plus, a farm can render several projects in parallel.
You receive an invoice for the service. This means that you can justify (and pass) the rendering costs to your client.
Paid solution: You do get access to all these resources, but you have to pay for them. The pricing is typically per computing hour (may it be on server-hour, core-hour or GHz-hour). You use more computing hours, you pay more computing hours. Also, farms usually have different pricing plans, depending on how many resources you need and how fast do you want your job queued. The basic principle is the same: you need more, you pay for more.
Have any questions about the subject? Ask away in the comments.
Reference: blog.render.st