Ai website builders won’t put hosting companies out of business, and it’s not close

Ai builders are obviously changing the hosting/reseller space, but I'm not convinced they're going to eliminate it.

An AI agent can now build a surprisingly complete website in an afternoon, including databases and forms. The bigger question is whether a normal small-business owner actually wants to manage everything that comes after that.

DNS propagation, SSL certificates, backups, plugin conflicts, broken pages, expired domains — those are the kinds of things that can turn into a panic call when someone isn't technical. And if a website is generating bookings or leads, having someone available to troubleshoot the problem can be worth more than simply having the ability to generate the code.

That's one reason managed hosting still makes sense for a lot of small businesses. Hostinger is one option I've seen discussed for people who want more of that support layer, while DigitalOcean gives you considerably more control but also leaves more of the management to you. GoDaddy is another option that plenty of businesses continue using simply because they're already there.

AI is going to make building websites easier. I'm just not convinced that means the hosting and agency side disappears — the need to actually keep those websites running is a different problem.