What is an AI-hosted website?

Ask an AI to make you a website and it will. In a few minutes you get pages, headlines, a colour scheme, maybe a working contact form mockup. Then the tool hands you a link, and this is where most people get quietly misled, because that link looks like a website and behaves like a website right up until the moment it matters.

It is worth having a name for the thing that link is not yet. We call it an AI-hosted website: a website that an AI built and that now runs in production, on real infrastructure, under a domain you control, with someone accountable for keeping it up. The first half of that sentence became easy in the last two years. The second half is the part this site exists to explain.

The definition, unpacked

An AI-hosted website has two properties at once:

1. AI built it. The pages came out of a conversation or an agent session with ChatGPT, Claude, Lovable, Bolt, Cursor, or whatever tool comes next. No hand-written HTML required, no developer in the loop unless you want one.
2. Real hosting serves it. The files sit on a server that a named operator runs, reachable at a domain that belongs to you, over HTTPS, around the clock, independent of the tool that generated them.

Neither property alone is the category. A hand-coded site on a good host is just a website. An AI-generated site that only exists as a preview is just a draft. The category is the intersection, and the interesting problems all live at the seam between the two halves: how generated files become a running site, who answers when it goes down, and what happens when you want to change it next month.

Five questions that decide whether a site is actually online

When someone shows you a link and says "my site is live", these five questions settle whether that is true:

• Does it have its own address? A real domain, or at minimum a stable subdomain on a hosting platform, not a random hash inside a builder's sandbox.
• Does it survive the tool? Close the chat, cancel the builder subscription, let the session expire. If the site disappears with any of those, it was a demo.
• Is HTTPS on and automatic? Browsers mark plain HTTP as unsafe. A production site carries a valid certificate that renews itself.
• Can you point a domain you own at it? If the answer is "only on the enterprise plan" or "not at all", you are renting a page inside someone else's product.
• Is someone operating it? Uptime, backups, security patches, a legal entity you can actually contact. Infrastructure is a responsibility, and a live site means somebody accepted it.

Score five out of five and you have an AI-hosted website. Anything less is a stage on the way there.

Why a preview link is not hosting

The preview link deserves its own paragraph because it is the single most common point of confusion. Builder tools and AI assistants generate previews so you can see your work, and previews are genuinely useful for that. But a preview is an artefact of the tool's own environment. It typically expires after a period of inactivity, lives on the tool's domain with the tool's branding in the URL, serves no purpose in search results, and offers no uptime commitment of any kind. Some previews even stop working when the underlying session is garbage collected.

Sharing a preview with a friend is fine. Printing a preview URL on business cards, submitting it to Google, or running an ad campaign to it is building on sand. The test is simple: if the URL contains the name of the tool that made the site, the site is not yet yours.

The same logic disqualifies two neighbouring cases. A zip file of generated code on your laptop is a website the way flour is bread. And a local dev server is visible to exactly one computer in the world. Both are one step from being real, but the step still has to be taken, and that step is hosting. What the step involves in practice is covered in how AI-hosted websites work.

The grey zone: sites published inside builder suites

One case genuinely sits in the middle. All-in-one builder platforms will publish your AI-generated site for you, often with a custom domain, and that does count as hosting by the five questions above. The trade is different: the site is hosted, but it is fused to the builder. The pages exist in the builder's internal format rather than as files you hold, so leaving the platform usually means rebuilding rather than moving. Whether that trade makes sense depends on your project: the full comparison lives at AI hosting vs website builders, and if your site is already fused to a builder, switching from a website builder to AI hosting is the migration guide.

The distinguishing mark of the AI-hosted category proper is separability: the AI that builds and the infrastructure that serves are independent layers. Any AI can write the files. The hosting takes whatever the AI produced. Swap either side without losing the other.

Why naming the category matters

Categories are decision tools. Once you can say "that is a preview, not hosting", a whole class of disappointments becomes avoidable before it happens: the portfolio that vanished before the job interview, the shop link that died the week the ad campaign started, the client site that turned out to be locked inside a tool the client never chose.

It also makes the workflow legible end to end. An AI-hosted website passes through recognisable stages: the AI builds it, the files are handed to a host, a domain goes live, and then the site gets operated over time. We walk through each stage in the prompt-to-production lifecycle, and the third post in this series, switching from a website builder to AI hosting, covers the move for sites that started life inside a builder.

Where AI-Hosted fits

AI-Hosted is a hosting platform built specifically for this category, powered by VibeDeploy and operated by Serso BV on infrastructure in Belgium. You bring a site from any AI tool, and it comes out the other side with a live domain, automatic HTTPS, forms, analytics, and rollback snapshots. Plans are flat at 15, 39 or 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.

But the definition above is deliberately bigger than any one platform. Wherever you host, hold your link to the five questions. If it passes, your AI-built site is genuinely online. If it fails, you now know exactly which step is missing.