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Why I Chose North Dakota to Build a Tech Business

Published May 4, 2026 · 6 min read · Dakota Hopson, Galaxy Cloud Solutions

Valley City, North Dakota has a population of about 6,000 people. There is no tech scene. There are no co-working spaces, no startup accelerators, no venture capital firms, no networking events with free kombucha. The nearest city with a significant tech presence is Fargo, which is two hours away.

Galaxy Cloud Solutions is headquartered here, at my house, on a server in my spare room. People sometimes find this surprising. I find it clarifying.

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The Cost Difference Is Real

I pay $85/month for business internet. In San Francisco that same bandwidth would cost significantly more. My electricity is $0.1164/kWh — among the cheapest in the country. My cost of living is low enough that I can build this business on a smaller revenue base than someone doing the same thing in a major city would need.

The economics of a small hosting business are tight. Fixed costs matter enormously at the margins. Being in a low cost-of-living area is not a consolation prize — it is a genuine competitive advantage when you are a one-person operation trying to reach profitability.

The Internet Is Flat

My customers do not care where my server is as long as it is fast and reliable. A developer in Austin using a VPS to run their side project is not getting a better or worse experience because the server is in North Dakota rather than a data center in Dallas. The latency difference is negligible. The reliability is what matters, and reliability is about hardware and network infrastructure, not zip code.

The internet really did flatten geography in a way that still feels remarkable. I am competing with hosting companies in major cities and winning some of those customers because I offer a better product at a better price, not because of where I am located.

The Quiet Is an Asset

There is very little noise here — social noise, distraction noise, the noise of a tech ecosystem constantly telling you to move fast and raise money and grow. That absence creates space to think clearly about what the business actually needs.

Most of the advice in startup culture is calibrated for venture-backed companies trying to grow at all costs. It does not apply to a bootstrapped hosting business run from a spare room in a small town. The quiet helps me stay calibrated to what actually matters rather than what the culture says should matter.

What I Miss

I am not going to pretend there are no tradeoffs. I miss having people to talk to who understand what I am building. There is nobody in Valley City who can look at my provisioning scripts and tell me if the architecture makes sense. Online communities fill some of that gap but it is not the same as in-person.

I also miss the energy of being around other people building things. There is a particular kind of motivation that comes from proximity to ambition, and I have to generate mine from other sources. Books, podcasts, the occasional video call, the feedback from customers who actually use the product.

The Real Answer

Honestly? I am here because this is where I am from. I did not make a calculated decision to build in a low cost-of-living market as a strategic move. I built here because this is home, and I found that the constraints of building here produced a leaner, more focused business than I might have built somewhere else.

The tech industry has a habit of assuming that the best things get built in the most expensive places. I think that is wrong. Some of the best things get built wherever someone who cares deeply about the work happens to be sitting.