After the quick setup of Surge as hosting platform for this blog I was very pleased with the simplicity. Unfortunately I stumbled into some issues (which is partly due to me being stingy).

The problem

When running the Lighthouse analysis on the hosted site (using the free server-1.surge.sh url) I got a really bad scoring on SEO:

When looking into why I realized that the problem is that Surge adds a robot.txt that does not allow crawlers on my site:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

After googling the issue I found out that this is by design in this issue on github. This is the response from sintaxi who owns the Surge repo:

For obvious reasons we don’t permit search engine indexing on our own domain with other users content. Using a throwaway account to file this issue does not compel me believe the policy is incorrect. A robots.txt works as expected with a custom domain.

So with that information I thought I get a cheap domain (something I was thinking of doing anyway). Said and done I bought server-1.eu and had it configured for Surge followng the docs.

Now the next issue arise:

I headed over to the documentation for Surge and found that I could force a redirect from http to https by providing https in the domain name on deploy:

surge --domain https://my-project.surge.sh

https://surge.sh/help/using-https-by-default

However for a custom domain I need to add my own SSL certificate, but that is only available if I upgrade to Surge Plus .

For my personal blog I do not think it is worth spending 30$ a month for hosting. If I had a professional site it would not be a lot of money, but since this is just a hobby, and I do not really count on getting many visitors I became stingy.

Whats next?

Next thing to do will be to explore some other options:

• Hosting it on my own hardware
• Vercel
• Netlify
• Github pages
• Render

Until then, thank you for reading!