Affiliate Disclosure

Any website that wants to grow and improve needs to be able to generate a steady stream of revenue sooner or later. MamboServer is no exception. While there are a couple of different ways to fund a website such as ours, including ads and donations, we went decided to go with the method we felt would be the least obtrusive for our readers. Namely, affiliate links.

If you’re familiar with affiliate programs offered by platforms like Amazon, eBay or Fiverr you probably already know how this works. If not, don’t worry because we’re going to explain things in detail down below.

What are Affiliate Links?

Affiliate marketing is a very common marketing strategy that has existed in one form or another for many years, both online and offline. The basic gist of it is that businesses reward their affiliate partners every time a new customer purchases one of their services. In this scenario, the businesses in question are some of the hosting providers we talk about in our reviews, comparisons, and guides.

The affiliate links themselves simply serve as trackers that tell affiliate partners where the new customers are coming from. Whenever you click on one of our affiliate links and end up purchasing a hosting-related product or service we receive a small commission from the company that sold it to you.

Isn’t This a Conflict of Interest?

It certainly can be in some situations but that’s not the case here. We do our best to try and partner with every hosting provider we talk about in our articles, so there’s no real incentive for us to promote one company over another. This means that if you end up buying a hosting service after using one of our affiliate links, we will (in most cases) receive a commission regardless of which company you’re signing up with.

Aside from the obvious monetary incentive, there’s also the issue of credibility, which we have considered very carefully before choosing this particular method of funding MamboServer. Our team is made up of experienced webmasters who have operated several other successful sites in the past. We know from personal experience that trust is difficult to build and very easy to lose in this line of work.

While trying to push users towards a certain company might lead to more short-term gains for us, it would most certainly be detrimental to the website’s existence in the long run. MamboServer is a project that we’re very passionate about and we want to keep it going for many years to come, so jeopardizing its future for potential short-term gains goes against our primary goal.

Why We Chose This Particular Type of Advertising

Although using ads and banners is a more common form of generating revenue these days, we feel it has a major negative impact on the user experience. In addition, having ads on our website would most likely also hurt its performance. I think we can all agree that having a slow website would be somewhat ironic (to say the least) considering how much time we spend testing and monitoring the performance of various web hosting services. And, of course, criticizing those that don’t perform very well.

As far as crowdfunding and donations are concerned, something like that wouldn’t realistically work for a project like MamboServer. Not only because we wouldn’t feel comfortable asking for donations but also because a system like that would put unnecessary pressure on us. If you read our page explaining the process behind our hosting reviews (insert reviewing process page link here), you know that we like to take our time and carefully asses every service before we write about it. Rushing this process is not an option as it would lead to lesser quality reviews and articles.

Do Affiliate Links Negatively Affect Users?

Not in the slightest. In fact, we do our best to try and help our readers via these links. As mentioned earlier, we earn a commission each time someone purchases a service after using one of our links. This commission isn’t subtracted from the amount paid by the user to the service provider. Instead, the service provider is the one paying out the commissions.

As far as the potential benefits are concerned, we try to negotiate special discounts with the service providers whenever possible so that our readers end up spending less, not more. These discounts are sometimes quite substantial and taking advantage of them can save you a good chunk of money, while also helping support our work in the process. Ultimately, we feel that affiliate links are a win-win situation for everybody in many instances. Or, at the very least, there’s no downside to using them.

Why Are We Disclosing This?

We believe that transparency goes a long way towards building a good relationship with our audience. As many of our faithful readers have undoubtedly noticed by now, we are very critical about companies that engage in predatory business practices and we do our best to always inform users about them. Yes, this very much also applies to companies that we are affiliated with as we are under no obligation to write positive reviews about their services.

Given that we take such a harsh stance against the lack of transparency we observe in others, we feel it is only fair to practice what we preach and be as transparent as possible ourselves. Our hope is that by doing so we can maintain a good reputation in the industry and continue to be seen as a reliable and unbiased outlet of information concerning the world of web hosting.