You had an idea, you described it to an AI tool, and a few minutes later there was a website on your screen. It looked good. Genuinely good — better than the thing you’d been putting off paying someone for.

Then you tried to actually put it on the internet, and everything stopped.

Where do the files go? What’s hosting? Why does it only work on that odd link the tool gave you? How do you point your own web address at it? And when you wanted to change the phone number, why couldn’t you find where the phone number lives?

This is the most common place to get stuck right now, and it is not a reflection on you. These tools are genuinely brilliant at the first ninety percent and almost silent about the last ten. Here’s the part nobody explained.

What you actually have

Start here, because everything else follows from it.

You have code. A set of files describing what your site looks like and does. What you do not yet have is a website — and the gap between those two things is the whole problem.

A working website is three separate things:

1. The code — the files. You have this, or at least the tool does.
2. Hosting — a computer, somewhere, that’s always on, holding those files and handing them to anyone who asks.
3. A domain — yourbusiness.com, pointed at that computer.

The AI tool gave you the first one. It probably also gave you a temporary preview address, something like your-project.some-tool.app, which is why the site “works” but doesn’t feel real.

That preview link is not your website. It’s a window into the tool’s own computer. It exists while your subscription does, the address isn’t yours, and you can’t put it on a business card.

Step one: can you get your code out?

This is the single most important question, and it’s worth asking before you spend another hour or another dollar.

Look through the tool for a button that says Export, Download, Download ZIP, or Connect to GitHub. Some tools have this and make it easy. Some make it awkward. Some don’t offer it at all.

If you can export it, you’re in good shape. The code is genuinely yours, and everything below is a solvable problem.

If you can’t export it, stop and think hard. You’ve rebuilt the exact trap that Wix and Squarespace users end up in: the thing you made only exists inside somebody else’s product, and you’re renting it forever. That’s a fine deal for a weekend experiment. It’s a bad one for the front door of your business.

If you don’t know which situation you’re in, that’s the question to go and answer today.

Step two: work out which kind of thing you built

“Hosting” ranges from trivial to a genuine ongoing job, and which one you’re facing depends on a distinction nobody tells you about. Ask yourself:

Does my site only show things — or does it save things?

If it only shows things (pages, photos, prices, an about page, a contact link) you have what’s called a static site. This is the good case. Static sites are cheap, fast, almost unbreakable, and there are several well-known services that will host one for nothing on a small plan. Getting it online is genuinely a short job.

If it saves things — customer logins, a database, bookings, payments, anything where information persists after someone closes the tab — then you haven’t built a website. You’ve built an application, and that’s a different commitment. It needs a server that’s always running, a database that gets backed up, and someone keeping an eye on security. It can’t be handed to a simple hosting service and forgotten about.

Most people who describe a “website” to an AI tool get the first kind, and are relieved to hear it. Some discover they asked for the second kind without realising, which explains why the hosting advice they found online didn’t make sense.

Step three: the actual steps to get a static site online

If you’re in the good case, the shape of it is:

1. Get the code out of the tool — export it, or connect it to a GitHub account.
2. Pick a host and connect it to that code. Several well-known services do this for static sites and will walk you through it.
3. Point your domain at the host. Your registrar — the company you rent yourbusiness.com from — has a settings page for this, and the host tells you exactly what to put in it.
4. Turn on the security certificate, which is usually one click and is what stops browsers warning visitors away from your site.

None of those steps is hard in isolation. What makes it feel impossible is that each one uses vocabulary from a different world, and no single page explains all four together.

One warning while you’re in your domain settings: your domain also routes your email. Change the wrong record and your website will look perfect while your mail quietly stops arriving. We wrote about who actually owns your domain name if that part is unfamiliar.

Step four: the harder question — can you still change it?

This is the one that catches people a month later, once the site is finally up.

You want to change the phone number. You open the files and find hundreds of lines you didn’t write, in a structure you didn’t choose, using tools you’ve never heard of. So you go back to the AI tool and ask it to make the change — and it changes the number, but also quietly breaks the contact form.

That’s the real cost of code you didn’t write. Not that it’s bad code — often it’s fine. It’s that nobody involved understands it, including, in a meaningful sense, the tool that produced it. Every future change is a negotiation with a black box.

For a personal project, fine. For the page your customers judge you by, that’s a slow leak.

So: finish it, or start over?

An honest read.

Keep going with what you have if: you can export the code, it only shows things rather than saving them, it does what you need, and you’re enjoying the process. Genuinely — get it online and be pleased with yourself.

Consider starting over if:

• You can’t get the code out of the tool.
• It’s about eighty percent working and the last twenty percent keeps moving.
• It needs to handle logins, bookings, or payments.
• It’s the front door of a business that people spend real money with.
• You’ve stopped being able to change it without breaking something.

That last one is the tell. A website you’re afraid to edit is a website that’s already going stale.

The thing worth knowing about “just fixing it”

A word of warning, because it’s counter-intuitive: inheriting a half-finished AI-built site is usually slower and more expensive than building the real thing from scratch.

Whoever takes it on has to read every line, work out what was intended, find what’s quietly broken, and then own it forever. Building fresh, they’d skip all of that.

That’s why we don’t take those projects on — not out of snobbery, but because we’d end up billing you more to produce something worse. If somebody offers to “just clean it up,” ask them to be specific about what that involves.

The upside is that a rebuild goes much faster than people expect in this situation, because you’ve already done the hardest part. You know what you want it to say. You’ve seen a version of it. You have opinions now. Most clients arrive with a vague brief; you’d arrive with a working prototype, which is worth a great deal.

Before you spend anything else

A short checklist:

• Can you download your code? Find out today.
• Does your site save information, or only show it? This decides everything about hosting.
• Is your domain registered in your own name? Check at lookup.icann.org.
• Do you know what your site would cost to keep running each month? For a static site that number should be very close to nothing.
• Could you change the phone number yourself, right now, without help? If not, that’s your actual problem — not hosting.

The short version

What you built is probably better than you think, and further from finished than you think. Those are both true at once.

You have code. You need somewhere to put it and an address to point at it. If your site only shows things, that’s a short job. If it saves things, get advice before you commit. And if you can’t get the code out of the tool, deal with that before anything else — everything downstream depends on it.

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If you’re stuck at this exact point, a call is probably the fastest way through it. We’ll tell you honestly which of the two situations you’re in, and whether finishing what you have or building it properly is the better use of your money. We don’t take over vibe-coded codebases — but we’ll happily tell you what we’d do with yours. Book a 30-minute call. No cost, no obligation.