Comparison framework

Builders, publish buttons, classic hosting, AI hosting: what actually differs

Once an AI has built your website, there are four realistic ways to get it, or something like it, onto the internet. They are not four flavours of the same thing; they are four different deals, each with a real catch. This page lays out the criteria first and the options second, so you can judge any provider with it, including us.

The one-paragraph version

Website builders bundle an editor with hosting and lock the site to that editor. Publish buttons in AI tools make temporary preview links that live and die with your subscription. Traditional hosting runs anything but hands you the server administration. AI hosting takes the files an AI built, puts them live on a domain you own, and handles the running. The right choice follows from who edits your site and who you want depending on to keep it online.

Five questions that decide it

Ask these of every option on your shortlist. They are vendor-neutral on purpose; any honest provider should have answers.

1.Who edits the site next month?

If the answer is a drag-and-drop editor, you are choosing a builder and marrying its interface. If the answer is an AI, the site needs to exist as ordinary web files an AI can read and rewrite. Builders store your site in their own internal format; AI hosting keeps it as files.

2.Do you own the address?

A site living at yourname.toolbrand.app is a tenant in somebody else's brand. Check whether a custom domain is possible, what it costs, and, more importantly, whether you can point that domain somewhere else later without rebuilding.

3.Does it survive the tool?

Publish buttons inside build tools tie the site's existence to your subscription to that tool. Cancel, and the link dies. Ask of any option: if I stop paying for the thing that built the site, is the site still online?

4.What happens when an update breaks it?

Real hosting keeps versions and lets you roll back. Preview links have one version: the latest. If you plan to keep changing the site, and AI-built sites get changed a lot, rollback is not a luxury.

5.How much operating do you want to do?

Traditional hosting gives total freedom and hands you the server keys, the update schedule, and the 3am problems that come with them. Be honest about whether you want to run infrastructure or just have a website.

The four options, judged by those questions

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Website builders (the Wix class)

You assemble pages in a visual editor; hosting comes bundled. It works, and for people who enjoy hand-editing it keeps working. The cost is a closed loop: the site exists only inside the builder, an AI cannot meaningfully edit it, and exporting usually means starting over. If AI is how you build, a builder is the one option that cannot absorb that.

Verdict: Right when a human wants to drag and drop forever. Wrong when an AI does the building.

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Publish buttons inside AI tools

Lovable, Bolt and friends can put your build on a link with one click, and for a demo that is genuinely great. But look at what the link is: a subdomain of their product, alive as long as your subscription, with little or no answer for forms, analytics, backups or staging. It is distribution for a prototype, not a home for a website.

Verdict: Right for showing work in progress. Wrong for a site with your name on the door.

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Traditional hosting (cPanel and FTP)

The classic path: rent server space, upload files, configure the domain, install certificates, keep everything patched. Nothing about it is impossible, and full control is real. But the friction lands exactly on the people AI just liberated from needing a developer: every step assumes vocabulary the AI era stopped teaching.

Verdict: Right for teams who want the server keys. Wrong if the whole point was not becoming an admin.

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AI hosting

The category AI-Hosted sits in: hosting designed to receive work from AIs. Any assistant builds the site; the platform gives that assistant a way to publish directly, then runs the result like a grown-up website, with your domain, SSL, forms, analytics, snapshots and staging. The editor lock-in of builders and the manual labour of classic hosting both fall away.

Verdict: Right when an AI builds and a real site has to come out the other end.

Where AI-Hosted fits, said plainly

AI-Hosted is a home for the fourth option. It is the hosting half of the AI-hosted equation: you bring any AI, we give it a deployment target it can use by itself, and the result is a live site on your domain with the running-it-properly layer included. How that handoff works step by step is covered in how AI-hosted websites work.

And the honest boundary: this is website hosting, not general cloud computing. Marketing sites, portfolios, landing pages, product sites and documentation are squarely in scope. A full application with its own server-side backend and database is not the job this platform is for, and we would rather say so here than after you have signed up. Who operates the platform, and what happens to your account, is documented on the about page.

Common follow-up questions

Is AI hosting just a website builder with AI on top?

No, it is closer to the opposite. A website builder bundles an editor with hosting and locks the site to that editor. AI hosting decouples the two: any AI builds the site as ordinary web files, and the hosting runs whatever the AI produced. You can switch AI tools tomorrow and keep the same site and host.

My AI tool already has a publish button. Why is that not enough?

For showing a friend, it is enough. Publish buttons produce preview links: usually on the tool's own subdomain, tied to your subscription, without proper form handling, analytics, backups or staging. The moment a site represents a business, needs its own domain, or has to outlive the tool that made it, a preview link stops being hosting.

When is a classic website builder the better choice?

When you positively want to edit visually by hand, never want to touch an AI, and are comfortable staying inside one vendor's ecosystem for the life of the site. Builders are mature products with big template libraries. The trade is lock-in: leaving one later usually means rebuilding from scratch.

When is AI hosting the wrong choice?

When the project is a full web application that needs its own server-side backend and database, think customer portals or SaaS products, general cloud platforms fit better. AI-Hosted runs websites: marketing sites, portfolios, landing pages, documentation and other front-end builds, and runs those properly.

Apply the five questions to us

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