A fresh report indicates that the majority Y Combinator companies utilize cloud hosting services for their infrastructure needs and utilize mostly Gmail for internal communication. These companies include Hipmunk, Disqus, Dropbox and Justin.tv, which is in turn also utilized by  SiliconANGLE itself.

“And in a showing of how popular cloud computing services have become, more than half of Y Combinator’s startups hosted their services on Rackspace and Amazon’s cloud computing options.

Some of Y Combinator’s most successful startups, like Xobni and Dropbox, went with SoftLayer over the more popular Rackspace and Amazon cloud computing services.”

We’ve extensively covered cloud hosting service providers, including Rackspace’s launch of two additional enterprise products dubbed Cloud Connect and Critical Sites. This comes along our coverage of cloud host Hosting.com’s being an exclusive supporter of VMware, a status many cloud companies strive for. Nonetheless, it does intend to keep its options open in context to utilizing Microsoft’s HyperV if and when needed.

Cloud hosting is a big deal, and open-source cloud services are not falling short either. In our previous coverages of the open-source cloud sector, we discussed, among others, IBM’s new General Parallel File System-Shared Nothing Cluster (GPFS-SNC) storage architecture, which incorporates the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). Additionally, we also covered Gluster’s $8.5 million series B funding. The round was led by Index Ventures with participation from existing investor Nexus Venture Partners.