I'm having pretty good luck with Foscam cameras.
http://foscam.us/
They don't require an onsite computer. You just browse straight to the camera from afar. I have a nice android phone app that will display the camera output in real time and let you pan the camera around.
I have one that uploads an outside picture every 10 minutes to an FTP site and I have and another setup to email me a series of pictures if it detects motion. Funny that a dark cloud crossing the sun on a bright day will make it think it's seeing motion in the house.
I've managed to keep mine alive all winter so far with a mechanical timer that resets my DSL modem once a day (since a hung internet connection seems to be the weak link).
This stuff isn't quite trivial to setup since it requires you to make a few setting changes in your internet router and they're all different.