Affiliate Disclosure.

Some links on RouteHarden are affiliate links. When you sign up for a service through one of those links, the vendor may pay us a small commission at no extra cost to you. This disclosure exists to comply with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's disclosure guidance and the EU's equivalent rules under the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive.

The rules we follow

1. Technical merit first.We recommend a vendor only if we'd run their product on our own infrastructure. If a vendor's commission rate is high but the product is bad, we don't link. Conversely, several vendors we recommend pay us nothing.
2. No paid placements in articles. Vendors do not pay to be mentioned. Vendors do not get to review articles before they ship. Vendors do not see our editorial calendar.
3. No sponsorships dressed up as content. If we ever publish a sponsored post, the title and the first paragraph will say so explicitly. We have not done this to date and have no plans to.
4. Transparent vendor list. Vendors that pay us a commission for referrals — or that we expect to apply to — currently include or may include hosting providers (Hetzner, BuyVM, Vultr, OVH, RackNerd, BandwagonHost, DMIT), commercial VPN providers (ProtonVPN), networking SaaS (Tailscale, Cloudflare), residential and rotating proxy providers (Webshare, iProyal), cloud GPU providers (RunPod, Vast.ai, Lambda Labs), registrars (Namecheap), and similar engineering tools. This list is not exhaustive and may change.
5. Prices are unaffected. Affiliate links never raise the price for you. The vendor pays us from their margin, not from a surcharge added to your bill.

What an affiliate link looks like in our content

The text of an affiliate link is the same as a non-affiliate link; only the URL differs (it carries a referral parameter the vendor uses to attribute the signup). When in doubt, hover over a link before clicking — you can see the destination URL in your browser's status bar.

Conflicts of interest

The author of RouteHarden runs a personal VPN setup using some of the same vendors recommended on the site. Our consulting practice (see Services) sometimes resells those vendors' products as part of a larger engagement. Where that creates a non-trivial conflict, we flag it inline in the article in question.

If you spot a violation

Email hello@routeharden.com if you find an affiliate link we forgot to disclose, a recommendation you suspect is paid placement, or anything else that looks off. We'll correct it publicly.