Can I really leave traditional web hosting behind?

Developers Getting Started
1

Not sure if I’m posting this in the right category, so please move if needed. I have a WoocCommerce/Elementor website that I’ve been running since about 2016 (my domain/site is actually 26 years old!). I am not a developer, nor a designer, just a do-it-yourselfer. I started using Elementor when it first came out because it was so easy, just drag and drop. But over time, the tool itself has gotten so complex for the non-developer to use. It’s to the point now where it just feels like a bloated tangled up mess that I’m trying to keep hobbled together, and on top of all those administrative headaches, it needs to continue to make a living for myself/family.

I’m tired of constantly dealing with plug-in and core updates and website backups and the whole nine yards that goes along with Wordpress. To be honest, I’m just burned out on the whole situation. I’ll sit down in a positive mood, open the Elementor editor to try and do something productive, and then fight it instead of getting things done. I won’t say what my site is, or what kind of products. But based on our success in the past (we were very early to the internet), and much user feedback accumulated over the years, I feel like we’ve only scratched the surface and things can improve. But in order for that to happen, I feel like I need to wipe the slate clean and start fresh.

I’ve been watching a good amount of Youtube videos where people show what they’re able to create with AI, and it’s beyond impressive and gives me some hope/excitement. My questions for the community here:

  1. Is it really possible to get it all rebuilt without a CMS like Wordpress using AI (Claude Code seems to be the favorite)?
  2. Including a new custom shopping cart system that meets my needs so I don’t have to use WooCommerce anymore? I use a third party hosted online course platform, with an automation set up between Woo and that platform.
  3. I got into ICP as an investment back in 2024. The thought of future proofing my site by hosting it on ICP appeals to me. And to be an actual user of the tech I’ve invested in! From what I’ve learned about ICP, that means no more cPanel, FTP, php, SQL, etc. Can a non-developer (I’m not a total idiot, but definitely not a coder) person realistically get their site up and running on ICP? Or are we a ways off from that reality?

I can envision a lot of possibilities opening up for my site/business by getting out of Wordpress. To have a site/presentation on par with the quality of the products we produce, and allow me to focus more on marketing and advertising than website headaches would be amazing. I’d just like to hear from others who have maybe gone this route, their experience, or any suggestions/advice you might have. I imagine there are many others out there like me who feel overwhelmed and stuck.

Thanks!

2

i did exactly this - moved from wp+elementor to on-chain. my website is a canister, but still resolved via the readable address so, yes, it is possible, with a little help from my machine-fren

www.exeud.com points to https://fkbtv-diaaa-aaaai-q3jva-cai.icp0.io/ but the address bar remains uncluttered by the scary canister id

i had to reroute DNS and register with the boundary nodes, but that’s all

one other small detail - i would suggest forwarding the apex address to the www domain, since principals are derived from the address, so you get two different ones depending on the presence of ‘www’ at the start.

3

@willguest I browsed around your site a little, it’s kind of over my head what the site is about, but it’s cool that you made it on ICP. Was this made by Caffeine? It sort of has that look like I remember when I played with Caffeine. Is your Elementor site still live? From what I can see, your site is pretty small though. I have a catalog of products, thousands of customer reviews, video galleries, photo galleries, blog and so on. Any regrets leaving WP?

4

Yes, you can.

What i recommend is to test it yourself so you get better understanding if its worth for your business.

  1. Go to NNS https://nns.ic0.app/ and make 2 canisters, about 1 ICP worth of cycles each.
  2. Download OpenCode (free), agent that works you you.
  3. Go to Deepseek and buy 5 usd worth of usage, i think its cheapest and will be plenty for testing. In there API keys and make one, copy it.
  4. Open OpenCode add Deepseek and put API code there, now you set to start.
  5. Tell AI to pull ICP Skills https://skills.internetcomputer.org/llms.txt . I saved them to my PC.
  6. Now tell AI to make Himself ICP account where AI can use its PID and report back what PID it has.
  7. Go to Your NNS account and add that PID to canister controllers.
  8. Now on OpenCode tell AI to install all needed applications for building, testing and deploying apps to ICP network. It can take a little time, but AI will set all up for you.
  9. In OpenCode, make new project, and say what you need it to build. You can test locally, that is if you want, or tell AI to test every feature for you. Usually it does good job.
  10. If app is ready or you want to test it on live canister, give AI 2 canister ID-s from NNS, tell AI that He is controller. Now AI looks it up and deploys it for you. And your site is live, for DNS, you can tell AI to build DNS setup into your Admin panel, at least i did like that with instructions. For Admin rights, first logged in user as Admin or fixed admin PID.

Best to do it with clean PC, AI will have access to it. You want to add Admin panel to your website, from it you can add items to sale or change website needed areas. Basically if you need something, tell AI and it can help you. If you want backup for data, you might want to make third canister what handles it.

I hope this helps a little, best thing to do is test yourself. (If your site is huge, need to think about cycle cost, keep loading small and multi canister setup.)

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@Henn91 Wow that’s a lot of information, thank you for the breakdown of the steps. Can you tell me what PID means? What do you mean by clean PC? Are you saying that the AI will have access to all data on my system? Or just the folder/data I give it access to? I looked at the opencode site, it says it comes with access to a set of free models. Are you saying those models are no good for generating html designs? Better to use DeepSeek to get a feel for it?

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*PID/Principal ID - the identity/address of a user/AI
*By clean PC i meant just for using for AI coding and for your projects. AI will have access to your set folder and files you approve, but to be safe, its best to keep on separate PC.
*Free models might be for some tasks, and at least for me i dont see any free models there. Deepseek is really cheap. With your own PC, building is cheap, with Caffeine, you paying lot more as its for profit after all.

7

Yes like i mentioned to you on your first post it is doable but you have to get started, it is not going to code itself. I prefer Codex over Claude Code but moving to local/open weights. Just pay the $100 Pro Chatgpt plan for a month and do a proof of concept unless you want to start with open weights which is a bit more complicated. Use chatgpt chat as your Project Manager and Codex thread as your Developer. First step is to get your static site up and running, once you have that then details (cart, Vimeo integration, etc) can be worked on afterwards. Don’t believe those youtube videos that say i built this or that with one prompt in xyz. If you want a good product you have to do it right. A do it yourselfer can easily do it, just be ready for a big learning curve. My website is hosted on ICP https://forum.dfinity.org/t/aion-exploring-sovereign-ai-architecture-on-icp/74594/4?u=alfonso

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I didn’t make it with caffeine - i did play around with it early this year, but the developer experience fell far short of other tools

all the webxr spaces are canisters, so it was a natural extension to make the homepage there, and also allows me to use it as an II portal and use cross-canister calls instead of https outcalls. for your case this would mean additional cycle costs, if there is a lot of back and forth with the trad web.

catalog of products, thousands of customer reviews, video galleries, photo galleries, blog and so on

will need specific consideration, since elementor and WP are designed for modular extension and, while this comes with lots of other noise that can get in the way, you also don’t have to keep track of each feature. for my case which, as you rightly pointed out, is quite limited in scope, it was sensible choice. i knew this ahead of time so have no regrets.

if done right, you would have short-term pain in switching across, but would benefit in the long-term, because the maintenance is less, and there is less bloat. if done wrong (not properly architected, poor security, reliance on outdated or abandoned packages…) you would just end up with a different kind of headache, and wonder where the time went.

You seem to know your requirements, current and future, pretty well, so i would suggest you find a technical go-between that can turn your practical requirements into technical specifications, and can also do a proper security review. a decent software engineer with AI is still very different to a non-coder with AI, although the gap is closing. machines can take on these roles too, but then your learning curve gets steeper, as @alfonso said

9

I actually have built a woocommerce and other e-commerce plugin for the ic.

But it’s kinda reverse of what you’re saying.

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@Henry_Suso What do you mean the reverse of what I’m saying? Do you mean you built a Wordpress e-commerce plugin?

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Idk how to explain it without just telling you what it is but it’s not really what you are looking for and I realized after the fact I probably shouldn’t have even responded to the thread. I was driving and saw the words woocommerce and posted but reading what your saying is that you have an established website/traffic/users to your web2 page and were wondering about migrating it to the ic.

What I built has nothing to do with it and it’s only commonality is your mention of commerce traffic and my plugin for woo commerce.

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But yeah that is kinda what I built idk. I’m gonna go live in November.

13

I’m sorry, you see how burned out I am, I completely forgot I posted a similar question not long ago! Thanks for the new reply. I’m considering everyone’s input.

14

That has always be the reason I never liked using such tools. A lot of the options you don’t need bloating it and some of the options you need are missing.

My guess is, NextJS will work best for you. That depends a lot on what your site is, but chances are, you don’t need a ‘CMS’ if you are the only person changing the site content. NextJS will generate your site as js/html that can be crawled by search engines (If you prefer not dissapearing in them). The alternative is to create a CMS inside a canister and then having SPA, then hope search engines decide it’s important enough to crawl it.
Instead you can have NextJS for the part that’s public - thats pretty much static and you add content and upload updated version (using an asset canister). Then also add interactive shopping cart, powered by another canister + using Internet Identity. Your payment processors can talk to it as well, it can have admin interface so you can manage the orders.

Claude/Codex will easily build that for you on the IC. Use the smartest AI mode you can get in the beginning and ask the agent to start with a research on what you are already have in Wordpress. Once that’s done give it the solution I wrote above and it will produce you the site and deploy it on the IC. This will be able to serve on its public part likely more users than you can bring, and my guess is up to ten thousand orders a day without slowing down. Pick a TEE subnet so your users can save their personal details while shopping, nobody can read them except you. During peak traffic - maybe you can have up to ~200 active users playing with their shopping carts. The public static part can take a lot more. Ofc it depends on the agent - thats how it should work like if it doesn’t make mistakes.

15

I looked up NextJS and don’t even know what I just read. Do I have to tell AI to use that? Or does the AI know what to do? This is starting to look less feasible if I have to be familiar with these types of things.

16

Just copy and paste what Infu wrote and tell it to make your website but on icp and click enter for like 72 hours.

17

Yeah, paste it what I’ve said and tell it to migrate your old site to that on the IC, but put better design. Tell it to not ask you technical questions, but ask you questions about business rules, things you can see on the site. You can turn on plan mode, I think that’s with tab and it will ask you questions and give u options while recommending one.
Tip: If you don’t get the technical part, never tell it to do something technical, because it will do it whatever it is. Maybe it’s best to use Claude, because Codex is more precise and less forgiving.

18

And one more thing, you can include this in your prompt:

Fetch https://skills.internetcomputer.org/llms.txt and follow its instructions when building on ICP

These are ICP related skills that DFINITY put together, it should give good context to the agent. If it seems stuck make the agent research the forums, docs etc. instead of keep guessing.

19

Do you think it’s wise to first build this on traditional web infrastructure and then later shift it onto the ICP ? Or is it better to start on ICP from the beginning?

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Best to start on ICP. You can really just talk to your agent and it will get everything done, without you having to go and register and configure anything manually. It will only ask for you to send few ICP in an address so it can create your canisters.