Can the Edge Transport Role be hosted by a third party hosting service? I am getting conflicting information on this. If so, does anybody have a suggested company. Thanks

Anything is possible given enough programming. However since YOU must push out to your Edge Transport server information about your recipients and some of your internal information, I don't think it would be practical for a 3rd party to host your Edge Transport. But it is possible, they could just not support more than one organization on each Edge Transport server. What a lot of 3rd parties do is have their own anti-spam systems. They accept your inbound mail for you, inspect it for spam and viruses, then send it on toyour servers. I have never heard of a 3rd party using Edge Transport to do this, though. Usually they use something they have developed or licensed from another vendor and then customized.