From a domain to a live site
Most people are looking at their finished site within an hour of signing up.
Mostly Hostly builds and hosts simple websites for small businesses — a bar, café, restaurant, gym, salon or local service. There's nothing to log into and look after, no plugins to update, and nothing that falls over at 2am. Here's the whole path.
1. Create your account
Sign up with an email and a password — it takes under a minute, and no card is needed to start. We'll ask you to confirm your email address so your site can go live.
2. Answer a few questions
The onboarding wizard asks about your place: its name, what it does, where it is and your hours. You can upload your logo, a photo or PDF of your menu, and pictures of your place — the AI reads them to pick your colours, copy your menu and prices, and fill your photo gallery. It takes a few minutes.
3. An AI builds the site
From your answers, an AI writes the whole site — the pages, a colour scheme that fits your trade, your menu, your opening hours, a map to your door. You get a preview to look at before anything is public. Want it different? Describe the change in plain words ("make it warmer", "move the menu up", "add a page about private hire") and it's redone.
4. It goes live — free for 7 days
Your first version publishes automatically on a 7-day free trial at a yourplace.mostlyhostly.site address, with the secure padlock (SSL) already set up. Subscribe any time during or after the trial to keep it online; if you don't, the site goes to a holding page and your files are kept so you can bring it back later.
5. Point your own domain
When you're ready, connect a domain you own — yourbar.com — and we handle the DNS and the certificate. The switch is zero-downtime. A custom domain is also the right move if being found on Google matters to you: search engines treat yourbar.com as your own site, which a shared free subdomain can't be.
Bring your own AI
Already pay for Claude or ChatGPT? You can connect it to your site and make changes from there, in plain English, instead of — or as well as — using our built-in AI. In your console, open your site's Connect tab, pick Claude or ChatGPT, and follow the short steps: add MostlyHostly as a connector, sign in with your MostlyHostly login, and tap Allow. Then start with “update” and your site's name — “Update Kelly's Pub with a Tuesday trivia night at 8pm” — and it makes the edit on your private preview. Nothing goes live until you publish, and edits made this way don't use your MostlyHostly AI credits.
Prefer a code editor? You can also get access to your site's Git repository from the console and push changes yourself.
What's included
- Fast, secure hosting with SSL included — renewed automatically
- A private preview before anything goes live, and one-click undo to the previous version
- Nightly off-site backups — and your site is a standard Git repository you can copy any time
- 500 MB of storage and 20 AI credits a month (a small edit costs 1)
- Edit from your own Claude or ChatGPT — no AI credits used
- A sitemap and search-friendly pages on every site, so it's ready for Google from day one
- Up to nine languages, plus teammates with manager or editor access
- Your own forms — quote requests, bookings, enquiries about a particular item — emailed straight to you
- Optional add-ons shaped to your trade — What’s On and event fliers, online ordering and delivery (a paid add-on, $15 a month; both in beta), bookings for tables, classes and rooms (a paid add-on in beta, $15 a month), appointments with you or your staff (a paid add-on in beta, $7 a month per person), and consulting
- Best-effort support, business hours
What it isn't
No visitor accounts or logins, no online shop beyond the paid ordering add-on, and no custom software running behind your site. Most small business sites don't need any of that. If yours genuinely does, tell us — it's a bigger setup and a higher fee, built only when a site actually needs it.
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