I came across http://www.renderrocket.com and when you sign up, you get 20 free render hours; so of course, I signed up.
Their website is incredibly user-friendly... you just login, upload your files, set up your render options, and go. Then you got a huge amount of quad core computers chipping away at your render.
I used their service to render my midterm, which took 11.6 render hours and completed in less than a half an hour, at some incredibly power hungry render settings. They managed to overexpose 3 'strips' of my render but hey, it was free. I am really impressed with what I got. A preview is posted below, along with links to the full size (I rendered it out at 5989x3300 pixels) .JPG and .TGA. The .JPG is in high quality, but due to the nature of the format, some quality was sacrificed to maintain a reasonable file size (4MB). The .TGA is an uncompressed image at the highest quality possible, but is 80MB.
Zooming in on the drawer knobs to see detailed in the full 40MB TGA reflections tickled me pink.
Full Size .JPG (4MB)
Full Size .TGA (80MB)
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="505" caption="Midterm Preview, click to enlarge preview. Full images are linked to above."]
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Use of render farms isn't and shouldn't be just restricted to large studios and 3D artists. Smaller studios have their own render farms and many freelance artists have them as well. Compositors and freelance motion-graphics artists can also make use of them. Some editing systems support the use of additional machines called render nodes to accelerate rendering, and this type of setup can be extended to architectural visualization and even digital audio workstations.
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