Hi, @th3wund3rninja.

Thanks for taking the time to reach out to the QuickBooks Community. Let me help provide some details about hosting Quickbooks Desktop. 

I'd like to acknowledge your effort in sharing very detailed information about your concern. QuickBooks doesn't have an option to host QuickBooks company file from a USB drive. Instead, you'll need to use the hosting service providers so you can run your QuickBooks and store your data files on a service provider's servers. 

You can check this article on what authorized third-party hosting providers can host the QuickBooks Desktop: What hosting providers are authorized by Intuit?. 

To turn on hosting in QuickBooks, here's how: 

1. From the File menu, select Utilities.
2. Click Host Multi-User Access.
3. Click Yes on the confirmation window.

If you need further assistance with the steps, I recommend to contact our QuickBooks Desktop Support Team. They have additional tools to pull up your account and do a remote session.

Here's how you can contact our customer support:

1. Select QuickBooks Desktop Help from the Help menu.
2. You can also press F1 on your keyboard to bring up the same Help Panel. 
3. In order to route you to the correct support expert, we need to know what type of question you have.
4. Click Continue.
5. We’ll provide you a few options. You choose which one is best for you.

Don't hesitate to leave a comment below if you have additional questions about the hosting. I'll be around to help. Have a good one.