Why there is no local hosting
I decided to move my website to a local hosting provider today in my quest to do business locally. I found about a dozen local New Hampshire businesses that claimed to host websites locally, only to discover, no they really resell hosting from another provider. I then learned there were no data centers in New Hampshire at all. In fact, even their providers were rebranding Google, Azure and Amazon Web Services as their own.
This worries me greatly. This means the web server industry consists of about 4 to 6 major players. We've all seen what happens when AWS, Azure or Google has problems: a huge portion of the internet goes down all at once. There is nothing you can do about it either. You can call your local web reseller, they will call their wholesaler, who then attempt to call Amazon, Microsoft or Google.
This consolidation has happened because these big mega corporations can hire a full time staff to maintain racks and racks of servers at a low price. Data centers are expensive to maintain and staff, it's cheaper to let the mega players do it. Since they do this at scale, they can do it it cheap.
I'm going to do something very radical here. I'm going build out my own data center right here in Bedford New Hampshire. Click here for my journey. I believe I can do it for close to the same price as the big players because I won't try to support big enterprises with my data center. Its focus will be local. As big business get bigger and more centralized, we need to counter this with more local, decentralized infrastructure.
Stay tuned.