Web sites can be any amount of money and so can hosting, I just sold a site (13 pages) for £400 not brill cos it took me forever and cost me about £130 for hosting and domain names etc
This time I took an American package at about £100 and am currently building about 30 pages on it.
With the prices quoted above I hardly think anyone is getting ripped off considering the overall value of a web site if its used properly.
However what I have seen is some awful home builds, you know those with terrible photos, like:
"this is me with my carpet machine in my back garden" looking professional.
or
"this is my sign written van outside my house" ignore the kids toys and the wife doing the windows and the dog pee'ing up the wheel.
or (and the best)
"this is us (well me and my mate) pretending to be doing something important - in shorts, flip flops and Man United t' shirts.
Another personal favourite for me is the home build guy that’s found the gadget button for adding effects. or includes massive photo files. Not understanding that each effect or gigantic photo file can take so long to load that people cant be bothered to wait and just move on.
There is nothing wrong in building your own site, its both economic and practical if you dont mind doing it, however just remember a few basic rules and view as many other web sites as possible so you can see what really does work. After all you have millions of £'s of work by professionals out there at you finger tips and its all free