Affiliate Disclosure

The short version

SyntaxMine earns a commission when readers buy a Minecraft hosting plan through certain links on this site. This costs you nothing extra — the price is the same whether you use our link or go direct. The commission helps fund the site's hosting, research time, and benchmarks.

Every affiliate link on the site is clearly labeled with the words "Affiliate link · supports SyntaxMine" directly under the button. Outbound link redirects also carry the standard rel="sponsored noopener nofollow" attribute as required by major search engines and advertising regulators.

Why we accept affiliate revenue

Running a technical media site costs real money — hosting, domain, research time, testing servers, software licenses. Affiliate commissions from genuinely useful recommendations let us avoid the alternatives: paid sponsorships disguised as editorial, programmatic display ads that ruin Core Web Vitals, or a paywall.

We'd rather earn a small slice when a reader picks a host we already recommend than ask everyone to pay or push intrusive ads at everyone.

How this affects our coverage

It doesn't affect the rating. Every hosting partner is scored using the same public rubric — Performance 25%, Modded support 20%, Support quality 20%, Trust & policies 20%, Value 15%. The breakdown is shown on every partner page. A high-commission partner with weak support gets a low support score; we don't hide it.

It does affect which partners we apply to. We only join programs from hosts we'd recommend regardless. A host with a 50% commission but a reputation for stealing customer money does not get an application.

If a partner downgrades materially — major outage, policy change, support collapse — their rating drops, and if it falls below 4/10 they get pulled from the site entirely. The affiliate relationship does not save them.

Our active affiliate partners

These are the partners we currently have affiliate agreements with. The list changes over time and reflects the actual contracts in place:

• BisectHosting — Direct revshare, 10% recurring
• Apex Hosting — Direct hybrid, revshare plus per-signup
• Shockbyte — Direct CPA, 70% of first payment, 90-day cookie
• ScalaCube — Direct hybrid, 50% first or 30% recurring

We may add new partners as we onboard them. New partnerships will appear in this list within seven days of activation.

What we don't take money for

• Article topics — we choose what to write about based on reader value and SEO opportunity, not on which partner is willing to pay.
• Sponsored posts disguised as editorial. If a piece is ever sponsored, it will be tagged Sponsored at the top of the article and marked as such on its card.
• Removal of cons or weak points from reviews in exchange for higher commission.
• Reviews of products we have not actually tested or thoroughly researched.

How to support us without using affiliate links

If you'd rather not click an affiliate link, the easiest alternative is to share an article that helped you. Word-of-mouth is how technical sites grow, and every share is worth more to us than a single referral commission.

Regulatory compliance

This disclosure is written to comply with the U.S. FTC endorsement guidelines and the UK ASA affiliate marketing guidance. If you operate from another jurisdiction with stricter rules and we've missed something, email us at contact@syntaxmine.com.