I am studying socket programming. So far, I was able to do it on local host. However, is there an online hosting with shell access, so I can put my practice into real environment?
I heard cloud service like http://www.heroku.com/ allow shell access, though I never try it before.
If you just want to mess around a bit while you learn something, I would recommend Amazon AWS you can deploy a VM running any OS you want in a few minutes. It is also a great skill to put on a resume and its free if you don’t use it much:
http://aws.amazon.com/free/