Testnet Radar is free to read and carries no ads. It is paid for by referral commissions, and this page says exactly how that works, because a reader deciding whether to trust a recommendation is entitled to know who pays for it.
Two different things can create a conflict of interest, and they are disclosed separately throughout the site because they are separate:
- Affiliate commission — we earn a fee when you rent a server or buy hardware through a link on this site.
- Comped goods and services — a company gives us something free or discounted: a server, an account, credit, or hardware.
Disclosing the first is not a substitute for disclosing the second. A page that was written on a free server says so on that page, whether or not it also carries an affiliate link.
Affiliate commission
Some links on this site are affiliate links. If you rent a server or buy hardware through one, we earn a commission at no extra cost to you — the price you pay is the same as it would be if you had typed the address in yourself.
The programmes we are in today are VPS and hosting referrals — Vultr, Hostinger, Contabo, and DigitalOcean through the AWIN network — and the Amazon Associates programme for hardware. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
Every affiliate link on the site is marked in three ways at once:
- It is visibly labelled where it appears, and the page carries a disclosure at the top and a fuller one beside the links.
- It carries
rel="sponsored nofollow", which is the machine-readable version of the same statement. - It goes straight to the provider. We do not cloak links, we do not use link shorteners, and we do not run redirects through our own domain. Amazon links in particular are raw Amazon URLs carrying our store tag, which is what Amazon's own terms require.
Comped goods and services
If a company provides something free of charge or at a discount — a review server, an account, credit, a device we keep — that is a material connection of its own, and it is disclosed on the page that makes the claim, next to the claim, naming what was provided and who provided it.
Nothing is ever agreed in exchange. A provider that gives us hardware gets no draft, no approval, no editorial input, and no say in the verdict. Measurements are published as measured, and an unflattering result stays.
As of the date on this page, nothing on this site has been provided free of charge by any company. When that changes, the pages it affects will say so before they say anything else.
What the money is not allowed to do
These are working rules, not sentiments:
- The commission never picks the recommendation. Where we name a provider, the reason is written next to the name, and it is a reason you can check.
- We never recommend a longer commitment than the job needs. Annual VPS terms pay us several times what monthly does. Guides state both prices and say plainly which one suits a temporary testnet and which suits an ongoing hobby. The choice is yours, and the commission does not get a vote in it.
- No unverified incentive claims. We do not tell you a testnet will pay out. Where a project has said something about rewards, we quote it and link the source; where it has not, we say that instead.
- Published commands are verified, not guessed. Guides carry a verification badge that only clears once a harness has actually executed the commands and captured the output.
How this is enforced
The rules above are checked by the build rather than remembered by a person. The site does not deploy if:
- a page renders an affiliate link without a disclosure, or without one above the first link on the page;
- a page declares that something on it was comped and does not disclose it, by name, where the claim is made;
- a page's own words say something was provided free and no disclosure is rendered anywhere on it;
- an affiliate link points anywhere other than straight at the provider.
Those are build failures, not warnings, and they run on every deploy. The reasoning is written up in the repository's decision records, ADR-0006 and ADR-0013.
Questions or a correction
If something on this site looks like an undisclosed connection, or a recommendation looks bought, tell us and we will fix the page or explain it — hello@testnetradar.com.