Guides
AI built your website. Make sure you own it.
AI made building a website easier. It shouldn’t make you less in control of yours. These guides take you from “I made a site with AI” to owning the domain, the code, the hosting and the accounts, with the ability to take it all somewhere else if you ever need to.
They’re written for the owner of the site, not a developer. If you built it with Lovable, Replit, Bolt, v0, Claude, Cursor or another AI tool and aren’t sure what you actually have, start with the overview, then come back here for the practical steps.
In reading order
Each guide stands alone. Read in order, they walk through the ownership questions one at a time: the address, the files, the service that runs them, and how to move any of it.
- 01
Where is my website hosted?
A step-by-step diagnostic for finding out who hosts your website, where its code is, whether there’s a GitHub repository, and who controls each account, starting with nothing but your domain name.
About a 14 minute read
- 02
How to register a domain you actually own
What a domain and a registrar are, why the registrar account should be yours, and the settings that keep the domain yours: recovery email, two-factor authentication, auto-renew and privacy. With a checklist.
About a 8 minute read
- 03
GitHub for website owners who aren’t developers
GitHub explained for people who own a website but don’t write code: what a repository is, why your site’s files should be in one under your account, and what to check so you could take them elsewhere.
About a 9 minute read
- 04
GitHub is not your web host
GitHub stores the code for your website. A host such as Cloudflare, Vercel or Netlify serves it to visitors. DNS connects your domain to the host. Why these are separate, and who should control each one.
About a 7 minute read
- 05
How to transfer a domain without breaking your website
How to move a domain to a registrar account you control while the website and email keep working. Transfer locks, authorization codes, timing, and the DNS mistake that takes sites offline. With before and after checklists.
About a 10 minute read
- 06
How to take your website with you when you leave an AI builder
Leaving an AI website builder means more than downloading the code. An inventory of everything a site depends on, from the domain to the database to the secrets, and a structured checklist for moving it all.
About a 10 minute read
The short version
Owning a website means controlling four separate things: the domain, the source code, the hosting, and the accounts the site depends on. Each has its own login and its own owner, and each can be checked in an afternoon without reading any code.
Once you do own it, you shouldn’t need to prompt an AI every time you want to change a sentence. That’s the problem Refino exists to solve, and it only works on a site you own in the ways these guides describe.
Early access
Refino is not open to everyone yet.
We are working with a small number of site owners first. If you built a site with AI and want to be able to change its words yourself, tell us about it. We read every message and reply ourselves.