Self-hosted website builders: what that actually means

Search for a self-hosted website builder and you get three different things wearing the same label. They are not variations on a theme. They fail in different ways, and the one you want depends entirely on what you are afraid of losing.

Model one: hosted only

The editor and the site both live on the company's servers. You design in their app, you publish to their infrastructure, and the URL is served by them.

This is most of the market, and it is not a scandal — it is why the sites are fast and why nobody has to think about certificates or backups. What you are buying is the whole stack, and what you are accepting is that there is no version of your site that exists without the company.

The tell: ask whether you can point your own server at the site. If the answer involves connecting a domain rather than moving files, it is this model.

Model two: design here, host anywhere

The editor is a service, but it will hand you a folder of HTML, CSS and JavaScript that you can put on any host.

This is the middle ground and it is a real one. Webflow does it, on Workspace plans — their docs are clear that Site plans do not include code export. Several smaller builders do it as their main selling point.

The catch is not the export, it is the gap between the folder and the site. Anything that was a service rather than a file stops at the door: the CMS, the shop, the form handler, the member area, the search. You get the shell, and often a CSV of the data, and you rebuild the rest. The Webflow export is a good worked example of exactly where that line falls.

The tell: ask what percentage of the site still works an hour after the export. For a brochure site it is all of it. For a site with a CMS it is the front page and not much else.

Model three: it runs on your own server

The software itself is installed on infrastructure you control — your host, your database, your files. WordPress with a visual builder is the version most people have met. There are others, and some are open source.

This is the only arrangement where the company disappearing is an inconvenience rather than an emergency. It is also the one with real work attached: updates, backups, and the day something breaks and there is no support queue to join.

The tell: can you take a database dump and a folder, move both to a different host, and have the same site? If yes, this is it.

Open source is a separate axis, not the same question

These two get conflated constantly. Open source is about the licence — can you read the code, change it, fork it if the company turns unpleasant. Self-hosted is about where it runs.

You can have open-source software running on somebody else's servers, and closed-source software running on yours. They protect you from different things. Open source protects you from the product changing in a direction you hate. Self-hosting protects you from the product being switched off.

If what worries you is the company being bought, you want the licence. If what worries you is the monthly bill or the shutdown notice, you want the hosting.

The five questions that settle it in a minute

Ask these of any tool before you build anything real on it:

1. If I stop paying tomorrow, does the site stay up?
2. Can I get the pages as files, and on which plan?
3. Of what I can export, how much still works — forms, CMS, search?
4. Is my content in a format something else can read, or only in theirs?
5. Can I move the domain without asking permission?

The answers are usually in the help centre rather than the marketing pages, and they take about ten minutes to find. It is the cheapest ten minutes in the whole project.

Runs on your server. Writes files you own. A visual editor inside your own WordPress, publishing static pages with no runtime behind them. Try DragGo free.

Where DragGo sits

Both of the last two, deliberately. The editor writes plain static HTML and CSS with no runtime behind it, so the export is just the site. And it runs as a WordPress plugin on your own hosting, which means the pages live on your server with your database and your backups.

That is not the right shape for everybody. If you would rather somebody else owned the uptime, model one is a perfectly sensible thing to buy — just buy it knowing which one it is.