How to Host a Website Made With AI: 4 Real Options Compared

An AI made you a website and now it needs to live somewhere. There are exactly four realistic places to put it, and they differ less in price than in what you own afterwards. This guide walks all four honestly, including the two we do not sell, and ends with the concrete steps to go live today.

First, know what you actually have

Before choosing a host, look at what the AI actually gave you, because it decides which options are open.

If you built in a general assistant like ChatGPT or Claude, or in a coding tool like Cursor, you have files: HTML, CSS and JavaScript, either pasted in the chat, downloadable as a zip, or sitting in a project folder. Files are the portable case. Every option below accepts them, directly or after an export.

If you built inside an all-in-one platform like Wix, Framer or Durable, you have a platform account, not files. The site exists as records in that vendor's system. Your realistic options narrow to two: publish where you are, or rebuild elsewhere. Tools in the middle, like Lovable and Bolt, generate real code and can hand it over via download or GitHub, which puts them back in the files case.

Option 1: the publish button inside your AI tool

Most AI building tools have some form of publish or share button that puts your site on a URL under the tool's own domain.

The honest pros: it is the fastest possible route, often one click, and it costs nothing extra. For showing a draft to a friend or testing an idea, it is exactly right.

The honest cons: the URL advertises the tool, not you, and everything about the arrangement is tied to your subscription and the vendor's policy. Preview-style links can expire with inactivity, custom domains are often gated to higher plans or unavailable, and there is usually no commitment to uptime, backups or rollback. It is publishing as a feature, not hosting as a product. Fine for a demo; a poor foundation for a business card, an ad campaign or a search presence.

Option 2: rebuild inside a website builder

You can take what the AI made, or at least its text and design, and reconstruct it inside a builder suite that includes hosting.

The honest pros: builders are complete products. You get a visual editor for later changes, packaged features like booking and e-commerce, and one vendor for domain, site and support. If non-technical colleagues will maintain the site daily through a dashboard, this is a legitimate choice.

The honest cons: the rebuild itself is manual work, and at the end of it your site lives in the builder's format on the builder's servers. The AI that built the original can no longer touch it. Leaving later means rebuilding again. You traded the file-based site an AI can edit for a platform account, and that trade should be made knowingly. The full comparison is at AI hosting vs website builders.

Option 3: traditional hosting, cPanel and FTP

Classic shared hosting will happily serve AI-generated files. Buy a plan, get a control panel, upload the files with a file manager or FTP client, point your domain, configure SSL.

The honest pros: it is cheap, mature and completely yours. No lock-in, full control, decades of documentation. If you already know this world, it works today exactly as it always has.

The honest cons: every step in that sentence is a step you perform by hand, in vocabulary the hosting industry invented for professionals. DNS records, certificate setup, file permissions, directory structures. None of it is hard for someone who has done it before; all of it is a wall for someone whose entire building experience was a conversation. And the wall returns on every update: each AI edit means another manual upload. The barrier that AI removed from building, traditional hosting reinstalls at publishing.

Option 4: AI hosting, built for this handoff

AI hosting is the category built specifically for this situation: hosting that the AI itself can publish to. Instead of you carrying files to a server, you hand the AI a deploy target, a single instruction file pasted into the chat, or an MCP connection for assistants that support tools, and the AI sends the site to the host from inside the conversation. It comes out the other side on a live subdomain, ready for your own domain, with SSL, forms, analytics, snapshots and staging handled on the platform side.

The honest pros: the handoff is the product. Going live takes minutes and no technical vocabulary, updates flow through the same conversation that builds them, and the deployed site remains ordinary web files you can take elsewhere. Rollback and staging make AI edits safe to try.

The honest cons: it is a paid product from day one after the trial, unlike a free publish button. It serves static sites and front-end apps, so a database-backed application with user accounts needs a different kind of platform. And there is no drag-and-drop editor: changes go through the AI or the files, which suits people who edit by describing, and not teams who want a visual CMS.

Going live step by step

Here is the shortest path with AI hosting, the option we can walk you through precisely:

1. Get the site out of the tool. In the files case, you already have it. In the platform case, let an AI recreate the site from your live pages and content first.
2. Create an account and hand the AI the deploy target. Paste the instruction file into your chat, or add the MCP connection in an assistant that supports it.
3. Say "publish this". The AI deploys and reports back with a live address on a subdomain. Open it on your phone to confirm it is really on the internet.
4. Connect your domain. Add yourname.com in the dashboard, set the DNS record it shows you, and SSL is issued automatically.
5. Wire up the follow-through. Point the contact form at the forms relay, glance at analytics, and take a snapshot before the next round of edits.

The mechanics of each step, and what happens under the hood, are laid out in how AI-hosted websites work.

Common questions

Can I use my own domain? Yes, and for anything beyond a casual project you should: it is the difference between owning an address and borrowing one. What connecting a domain involves, and why it matters more than any other upgrade, is covered in custom domains for AI-built websites.

What does it cost? On AI-Hosted, plans are flat at 15, 39 and 129 euro per month including VAT, listed on the pricing page, and every account starts with a 14-day free trial that asks for no card. Traditional hosting can be cheaper; builders land in the same range; publish buttons are free until their limits stop being free.

What if I switch AI tools next year? With options 1 and 2, the site is attached to the tool, so switching means starting over. With options 3 and 4, the site is files, and files do not care which AI wrote them. Next year's better model picks up exactly where this year's left off. That portability is quietly the strongest argument for keeping the building layer and the hosting layer separate.