As I took time off last year and thought about different business models, one that I dismissed was getting back into the website hosting business.

Louisville, Kentucky (KY) is a fairly low-cost part of the country, but even here, local website hosting companies charge at least $29 per month for the most basic web site. At companies like GoDaddy you probably won't pay that in a year. And if you think you're paying extra for service, you're wrong -- I'll explain this more in a future post.

One more piece of bad news for the local website hosting companies here in Louisville (and elsewhere) is that -- because of all the middlemen involved in their hosting business and economies of scale -- there's nothing they can do to compete with GoDaddy and other national hosting services.

What about supporting the local guys?

I'm all for supporting local businesses when the prices are at least close, but when I'm looking for a place to host my website, and the local guys are 10-100 times more expensive than the national providers, well, I have to pay attention to that. At that level I'd much rather keep that money in my own business instead of trying to support a local hosting company with a flawed business model.

I'll get into more detail in future posts, but in the meantime my belief is clear: if you're paying for one of those $29/month website local hosting deals for a simple website, you're wasting your money. Even worse, if you're paying much more than that because your web site has a store or uses a database, wow, you're really wasting a lot of money.