RunCabin Blog · How it works

How to connect and manage your website with AI

October 14, 2026 · 7 min read

RunCabin is the easiest way to connect and manage your website with AI. You connect it to your assistant once, and from then on keeping the site current is a sentence: "change our Saturday hours to 8 to 2," "add a quote form," "is the site getting any visitors?" The assistant reads the live page, makes the change, checks it, and puts it back online at the same address. This post covers how that works, what it costs, and what keeps it safe.

A few months ago we wrote about publishing a website straight from Claude. Getting a page online was the first problem. The bigger one comes a week later, when the hours change, a price goes up, or a customer asks why the contact form never answered. Most small-business websites go stale not because the owner doesn't care, but because every edit means logging into something, finding the right page, and hoping nothing breaks. If you already talk to an AI assistant every day, it can do that part for you.

What "manage your website with AI" actually means

It means the assistant can take real actions on your real site, not just write code for you to paste somewhere. Here are requests that work today once RunCabin is connected:

• "Change our hours to 7 to 3, Tuesday through Saturday." The assistant reads the page that is live right now, edits the hours, and publishes it to the same address.
• "Add a contact form, and tell me who wrote in this week." RunCabin gives the site a working form, the messages land in your inbox, and the assistant can read them back to you.
• "Is my website up? Is anyone visiting it?" You get whether it is serving, whether its forms are wired correctly, and visit counts for today, this week and this month, with your top pages.
• "That last change looks wrong. Put it back." Earlier versions are kept, so the assistant can roll the site back to the version before.
• "Put it on sunrisebakery.com." The assistant checks whether the name is available and what it costs, then hands you a checkout link. You approve it, and the domain, its settings and its security certificate are set up for you.
• "Give us an email address at our domain." On a domain bought through RunCabin, hello@yourdomain.com can forward to your current inbox.
• "Google Search Console wants a verification record." On a domain bought through RunCabin, the assistant adds it for you. No DNS dashboard involved.

How to connect your assistant

You do this once. After that, managing the site is just part of the conversation.

1. Claude (web or desktop): open Customize → Connectors, choose Add custom connector, and paste https://runcabin.com/mcp. A normal sign-in window opens in your browser. There is no key to copy.
2. Claude Code: run claude mcp add --transport http runcabin https://runcabin.com/mcp.
3. Cursor and VS Code: use the one-click buttons on the connect page.
4. ChatGPT: add the same address as a custom MCP server: open Plugins, select the plus button, then Add custom MCP server. Claude is still the smoothest path.

New: terminal tools can sign themselves in. If you run a coding agent or a script, it can now ask RunCabin for its own key. The tool shows you a short code, you open runcabin.com/keys, sign in, check that the code matches, and approve. The tool receives its key, and you get an email saying which tool got one and when. The tool never sees your password, and you can revoke its key on the same page at any time.

Your AI now builds to a standard

Any AI can write a web page. The trouble is that it writes a slightly different one every time, and it fills gaps with things you never said: a five-star review from a customer who doesn't exist, "family owned since 1998," a price it guessed. On a business website those aren't style problems. They are claims with your name on them.

So RunCabin now gives every connected assistant a build guide before it touches your site. It covers:

• Works on a phone first. The basics every page needs, including a page title that names your business and your town, so search engines and AI assistants describe you correctly.
• Only your facts. No invented reviews, ratings, prices, hours, licenses or years in business. If you didn't give it, it stays off the page.
• Forms that actually deliver. A form that posts nowhere quietly loses every lead. The guide makes the assistant wire it to a real form endpoint.
• Looks like a person made it. The same design and wording rules we use for the sites we build ourselves, so your page doesn't look like every other AI template.

Every time the assistant publishes, RunCabin checks the page against that guide and hands back a short list of anything that misses: a missing mobile setting, a broken link, a form wired to nowhere, a password or API key that would have gone public. The assistant fixes the list and publishes again. You see the result, not the back-and-forth.

The guide is built from the same rules our own website builder follows. When we improve those rules, every connected assistant gets the new version on its next publish. Nobody has to update anything.

What it costs

Free: your site is hosted at a RunCabin address like https://your-name.sites.runcabin.com, with HTTPS, a working contact form, visit counts, and older versions kept for rollback. No card needed.

On your own domain: hosting is $4.99 a month or $47.99 a year, which saves $11.89 over paying monthly, plus the domain's own yearly price. You choose monthly or yearly on the checkout page, and both prices are shown before you pay. The assistant can only hand you that link; it has no way to spend money on its own.

The domain is yours. A domain bought through RunCabin is registered for you. If you ever cancel, we release it with the transfer code so you can move it anywhere.

Where your site runs

Every site RunCabin hosts runs in Hetzner's Falkenstein data center park in Germany, on 100% renewable electricity from certified hydropower. It costs you nothing extra; there is no green tier. We won't call it carbon neutral, because servers still use power, but we chose a data center that runs on renewable energy and we pass that on to every site by default. More on that on our about page.

How we keep it safe

Letting an AI work on your website should not mean handing it the keys to everything. A few rules we hold to:

• Your sites only. A connected assistant can reach the sites on your own account and nothing else.
• Money needs you. Buying a domain or starting hosting is always a checkout link you open, review and pay yourself.
• Mistakes are reversible. Earlier versions of every publish are kept, and rolling one back is one request.
• Keys you control. Every connected tool and key shows up at runcabin.com/keys, where you can revoke it. You get an email when a terminal tool signs itself in.
• Secrets stay private. A publish check stops a page from going live with a password or API key in it.

We also keep hardening the platform underneath, so that each customer's site stays separate from everyone else's. That work never needs anything from you.

Good first requests to try

Once you're connected, try these in your assistant:

• "Read RunCabin's build guide, then make a one-page site for my business and put it online."
• "Look at my website and tell me what a new customer can't find."
• "Add our new service, power washing, with a short description, and publish it."
• "Any messages from the contact form this week?"
• "What would it cost to put this on our own .com?"

If you would rather someone just do it for you

Plenty of owners don't want to manage a website at all, even by chatting, and that is fair. For that, we build the site for you with AI from your answers to our planner, a web developer finishes it, and it goes on your own domain, with a quote form that goes straight to your inbox. It starts at $499 to build, then $39.99 a month. Read how it works on the done-for-you small-business websites page, or go straight to our planner.

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Related reading: website hosting for AI agents · is it safe to let an AI agent update your website? · how to publish a website from Claude · what an AI-editable website is · what a small-business website actually costs