If your website is hosted on WordPress, which is one of the most popular platforms people use today, I'm sorry for you. I want to let you know there is a better way to build your website today, and it's how I'm building mine right now. My website is hosted on Internet Computer Protocol because, in my experience, it is the most advanced website hosting in the world. You can have everything hosted directly on the blockchain, which makes it tamper-proof, verifiable, and so much more secure. Plus, you can build the whole thing with AI from scratch. I went deeper on why this combination works in ICP and Claude Code Is the Best Web Hosting Setup Online, and this post is the WordPress side of that story.
Ten Years of WordPress Misery
I used to have my website hosted on WordPress, and it was a nightmare. I used so many different themes and plugins over the years: Elementor, then Elementor Pro, Astra, WooCommerce to run my shop, and LearnDash to try and sell courses. My God, it was miserable. There was always something breaking.
I was paying $100 a month for my web hosting on Kinsta because it was managed hosting on Google Cloud, and I needed to make sure I had enough speed coming through so that if I went viral, my website didn't crash. That fear came from experience. Before Kinsta, I had my WordPress website hosted on some garbage GoDaddy plan, and when I went viral, my whole website went down because the shared server hardly had any capacity.
I tried for years and years. I built website after website on WordPress, and they always came out ugly. People made fun of them. I would try to optimize for page speed, and it never really worked. If you try to change themes, it's a nightmare. If you put something like WooCommerce on, it slows your pages down. You have to constantly update everything. It's horrible, and there's a better way now.
Editing My Homepage Live With Claude
My website at jerrybanfield.com is hosted on Internet Computer Protocol and is built from scratch with AI. What is so helpful about building with AI is that when I look at a page and think, I don't like how I built this, I can just say so. While I was writing this, I decided to prove it. I took a screenshot of my homepage and typed into my Claude terminal: remove that blue line underneath the review button and remove that header image above it. I literally just tell it what to do, and it makes the change almost instantly. I first saw how fast AI could build on the blockchain when Caffeine AI Built Me a Website on the Blockchain in One Prompt, and working directly in the terminal with Claude has taken that even further.
And no more crappy WooCommerce. I am able to build out and sell anything I want on my website, from products and services to physical things I ship in the mail. I can take credit cards. I can take crypto. I have thousands of blog posts on this website. I have built-in email that is super cheap, so I don't have to use Mailchimp or anything like it. There are no security updates I have to do either.
What It Costs to Host on ICP
The web hosting cost for all of this is shockingly small. I have a website with something like 2,000 or 3,000 individual assets: pages, images, URLs. How much do you think it costs to host all of that for a month? Less than $10 a month. That's all in. That's everything. The hosting is disgustingly cheap on ICP.
Because it's built on a blockchain, ICP is able to do micro transactions. Every time someone comes to my website and loads it, it charges a tiny, tiny, tiny amount. If you want the basics of how that works, I laid it out in The Simplest Possible Explanation of ICP. What that gives me is scalability, which is amazing. If 100,000 people come through my website in one day, it's just more micro transactions, and I pay a little bit for that, probably about a dollar. I have thousands of people come through my website every day, which adds up to hundreds of thousands of visits a month, and it costs less than $10 a month. I wrote about why this pricing model matters for the whole industry in Other Blockchains Need ICP to Stay Cheap.
The one thing you do need to pay for is the AI. Whether it's Claude, ChatGPT, or Codex, you need to pay for the AI to build it all out on ICP. For most people, that means at least a $100 a month Claude or ChatGPT plan. However, you can do a ton of other stuff with that plan, and a bunch of you already have AI plans. Once you build the website out initially, you may be able to drop your plan a lot lower. For the initial build-out, though, you may need the higher plan with higher limits.
Getting In, Staying Up
I know that to some of you, it might seem scary to get into the command line and start figuring out how all this works. But if you're a person who's even a bit of a fan of AI, it's really not. Claude and ChatGPT are so good that you can literally copy and paste your way through the command line the entire time. Setting up an Internet Identity, it handles all of that super easily. You can buy ICP directly off an exchange like Coinbase and send it over to fund your wallet very easily. I shared my approach to buying in How to Buy More Crypto and Pay Less Fees on Coinbase. This tech is so vastly superior.
There's another reason I moved. If you're on something like WordPress and you're hosted on Google Cloud, your website could be taken offline if you upset anybody at all. If anyone at Google Cloud gets upset with you, they can take your website off. Any reason you upset your website host, they can take things down. And there are all kinds of terms and conditions on some of these platforms about exactly what you can host there.
The ICP infrastructure is also resilient. My setup on ICP right now is hosted globally. It's not just going to go down because a Google Cloud server went offline for maintenance in whatever data center you picked. I believe there are 13 machines on my subnet, so I think I'd have to lose at least seven of them for my website to go offline at this point. That resilience is a big part of why I believe ICP Could Rebuild the Internet—and Most People Would Never Know.
ICP is also building your own privately controlled version of this, which is just coming out now, called Cloud Engines, for anyone with an enterprise level of demand. But for most entrepreneurs who are just using WordPress, the amount of money you can save and the amount of customization you can have is incredible by comparison.
How I Rebuilt AngelaHutchinson.com
This is a website I just built with Claude, and what's so cool is that if you already have a WordPress website, you can just tell Claude or Codex: here's my existing website, I want you to build something similar. The same goes if you've got Replit or another platform like that.
My friend Angela Hutchinson was paying $50 a month for some garbage vibe coding platform to run her website, AngelaHutchinson.com. When she told me she was paying for that hosting, I thought, let me put that on my ICP system. I literally just went into Claude, gave it the old version of AngelaHutchinson.com, and said: look at this and build me the same version, including the pop-up that was on the last version. It rebuilt her website rapidly, and then I moved it over to the ICP blockchain.
She was paying $50 a month. Now her website is so cheap that I don't even notice the cost. It's less than one cent a month for me to throw her website onto ICP hosting. And if she goes viral, I've got so many cycles sitting in there that probably 100,000 people could come through her website at once and it wouldn't crash, because I'm sitting there with extra cycles in it. If her website doesn't use them, or she wants to move, I can just take those cycles and put them into another website. This setup is so far advanced past what everybody's doing on WordPress.
Want Help Moving Your Website to ICP?
If you want help setting this up, go to jerrybanfield.com, click on the review button, and tell me to look at the website you have. I can look at the website you have and get back to you and tell you: is this something you can move onto ICP, and how hard would it be? In most cases, many of you have simple websites. You could ditch your WooCommerce, ditch your themes, ditch all that stuff, and save a ton of money on hosting.
By the time I finished explaining all of this, the change I asked for was live. I refreshed my homepage and the extra header image was gone, and the blue line under the review button was gone. Almost instantaneously, while I was writing this, Claude stripped off what I didn't like. That's how cool this is. Dealing with WordPress sucks so much by comparison. My God, I spent 10 years fooling with WordPress, making ugly websites. This is miraculous to me.
So if you want to get started, go to jerrybanfield.com and grab a review. Buy a review and say: look, do you think I can move my website over? How hard would it be? How much money could I save? All you need to do is send me your website URL via email. It's a simple workflow. You buy the review, then you send review@jerrybanfield.com your website. If you have a specific question, like could I move this off of WordPress and how hard would it be, I've already done this, so I already know how to do it. I'll tell you something like: yeah, for the website you've got, probably $100 a month for the AI plan to set it up and build it out, then you can drop that way down, and hosting will be nearly free.
At this point, I'm honestly not sure if I want to do the migration itself for other people, but that's something you can ask about. With a setup like this, I can even put up little previews before anything goes live, so I might eventually be able to offer a service where I give you a domain with a rebuilt version of your website so you can see what it would look like. Either way, the place to start would be to grab a review from me to see how easy this would be to do for your website and how much money you could save. I hope to see you on jerrybanfield.com soon.
I use ICP every single day, and I explained why I went ALL IN on Internet Computer Protocol. I'll share more about how I use it in upcoming posts, and you can find all of those videos in my ICP Crypto playlist.