AI coding tools like Claude Code and Codex can give you a finished website that isn't online yet. Hosting, security, backups and everything that keeps a site running are still yours to figure out. Here's what that actually involves, and how to tell whether your site is ready for the public.
Building a website with AI tools like Claude Code and Codex can get you a rough draft fast. You describe what you want, spend an afternoon or a weekend iterating, and end up with something that mostly works. Then you hit a wall. The site is functional but unfinished, it needs someone who actually knows what they’re doing to fix what’s underneath, and there’s nowhere for it to go.
This catches people off guard because it’s not how typical website builders work. If you’ve used Wix or Squarespace, hosting comes with the product. Getting your site online is as simple as clicking “Publish”. AI coding tools are different; they write the website, but what happens afterward is an open question.
Do AI Coding Tools Host the Websites They Build?
No. What you get at the end of a session is the source code itself sitting on your computer. There’s no URL anyone can visit, no server running it, and no infrastructure that makes a website available to the public.
A few of these tools have already started adding ways to publish a site, and the landscape is shifting quickly. But as a rule, if you built your site by describing it to an AI assistant, finding a home for it is still a separate decision.
What Does It Take to Put an AI-Built Site Online?
A live website needs a server to run on and a secure connection so browsers don’t warn visitors away. It needs your domain pointed at the right place, and it needs backups you can actually restore from when something goes wrong. It needs its software kept current, because most security problems come from known vulnerabilities that were patched months earlier and never applied. It needs something watching to tell you when it goes down, since otherwise you’ll probably find out from a customer. And it needs someone who can fix it.
Where Do People Host AI-Built Sites?
Services like Vercel are common destinations, partly because some AI tools tend to recommend them. But Vercel’s free plan is restricted to non-commercial personal use, and the definition is broader than most people assume. Vercel’s own guidelines list “advertising the sale of a product or service” and “receiving payment to create, update, or host the site” as examples of commercial use.
Other services handle this differently. Some, like Netlify, allow commercial use on their free tiers without issue. Others, like Render, allow it but tell you outright not to run a real business site on the free plan, because those sites shut down after periods of inactivity and their free databases expire after a month.
Can My AI-Built Site Lose Information?
AI tools tend to store a site’s information in a simple file that sits alongside the website’s code. It’s a sensible choice while you’re building on your own computer. The trouble is that many hosting services treat this kind of file as temporary. Every time the site updates or restarts, it gets wiped and replaced with a fresh copy.
DigitalOcean’s documentation states plainly that files stored this way are “permanently lost after deployments and other container replacements.” Heroku’s guidance is blunter: a site set up this way would lose its entire database at least once every twenty-four hours.
Think of this in terms of a contact form. A site visitor fills out the form, receives a thank-you message, and then the message goes into a file that disappears the next time anything changes. There’s no error message and no alert, because from the software’s point of view nothing went wrong.
Is My AI-Built Site Ready For the Public As-Is?
We wrote about this in more detail in our post on the risks of vibe coding a business website. The short version: AI is good at making something that functions and much less reliable at addressing the things that don’t show up on screen, like security, privacy, search engine optimization and page load times.
Veracode’s 2026 research finds that AI-generated code is syntactically correct more than 95% of the time, meaning it looks like working code. It passes security checks about 55% of the time. This is a big gap. Just because the code works doesn’t mean it’s safe to put on the internet.
A related detail worth knowing: passwords and access keys accidentally left in a site’s code don’t expire on their own. GitGuardian found that 64% of the credentials exposed publicly back in 2022 were still valid in early 2026. A mistake like this sits there indefinitely until someone finds it, and there’s nothing on the site to indicate it happened.
None of this makes AI-built sites unusable. It means a developer should look at one before it goes live, which is a normal step in professional web work and an easy one to skip when the site already appears to be working fine.
What Should Hosting and Support for My AI-Built Website Include?
At minimum, your website needs a secure place to run, backups on a regular basis, someone to test updates before they go live, and a person who can give you answers for things you’re unsure of. The last item is the one people tend to undervalue until they need it. A hosting company will keep a server running, but it won’t open your site’s code and figure out why your contact form stopped collecting responses.
Here’s how Infomedia handles it. Hosting is included with our support packages rather than billed separately. Sites run on our own servers, each partitioned from the others, with an SSL certificate included so your site loads securely. We back up your site daily and keep thirty days of history, so restoring to a previous backup is easy. Software and security updates are typically tested in a separate environment before they touch your live site. We guarantee 99.9% uptime for sites we host.
For support, our Birmingham-based team is reachable during business hours, and emergency phone calls are answered around the clock by an actual person.
Before you settle on where your AI-built site should live, ask yourself:
- Where does the information that this site collects actually go? Will it still be there in a month?
- Has anyone with development experience looked at this before it goes public?
- Am I allowed to use this hosting plan for a business website?
- If this breaks on a holiday weekend, who do I call?
- Who understands this site well enough to change it six months from now?
What If the Site Isn’t Really Finished?
If you discover your site isn’t as finished as you originally thought, you’re not alone. Many AI-built sites get to around 80% done, then stall. The front of the site looks finished, but on the back-end, there could be hidden issues. There is also likely nothing set up to tell you if your site goes down.
These aren’t necessarily difficult problems. They’re the unglamorous last stretch of a build, and the AI conversation that produced the site rarely gets far enough to address them. Often, it’s just because you have to know what else to ask for.
Our development team is full of experts in building and maintaining websites, and they’ve seen most of the ways a site can go wrong before it goes live (and after). We host and support AI-built sites, and we’re regularly brought in to finish builds that got most of the way there and stalled. Sometimes, that’s a few days of cleanup and a proper launch. Occasionally, it’s more. We can tell you honestly which one you’re looking at.
AI Can Build the Site. Something Has to Run It.
Building a website and its continued maintenance are very different jobs. AI is getting better at the first, but the second is where problems begin to surface. Someone has to put the site somewhere safe, keep it current, back it up, watch it and fix it if it breaks.
This isn’t an argument against building this way. Used well, AI gets you a working website quickly. But it’s important to recognize that when the tool’s job ends, it’s not the end of your project.
If you’ve built something with AI and you’re trying to figure out where it should live, or whether it’s ready to go live at all, contact our team. We’re happy to take a look and advise you on how to get your site out in the world.
