How do you even begin to choose an affordable cloud-based hosting company for a SMB Tech start-up?

As Bob points out, this is a very broad question but since we are a tech start up, here is what we learned:

If you need day-to-day capabilities like email, file storage, etc. use a system like Office 365 - it provides all the basic 'office productivity' capabilities in the cloud - and frees your team from having to worry about this stuff (managing email even for a small shop can be time consuming).

For accounting, we started with QuickBooks, however if your offering is going to leverage ecommerce, you might want to consider a solution like NetSuites.

If you need a development platform, it depends on what you will be developing on. If you are using the LAMP stack, consider services like Amazon which can be quite cost effective. Microsoft based platforms tend to be more expensive, but we've had good luck with providers such as Apps4Rent and FPWeb.

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Cloud9 Real Time

Actually a good option would be Cbeyond

Knowing what you actually want to have hosted is the first element... different providers specialize in different areas, and it's unlikely that you will find a one size fits all hosting provider to handle websites and business environments both.

There are a variety of businesses that can host your QuickBooks and Office apps (like Uni-Data, Cloud9 and other authorized QB hosts), but they aren't in a position to host your website or web-based apps. On the other hand, there are platform folks out there (Rackspace, Softlayer, ThinkGrid) that can give you IT solutions, but not necessarily managed applications.

So... as a tech startup, have you selected your various operational systems yet? That's the place to start (messaging, productivity, accounting... CRM...)

:)
J