How We Work

At Cloudwards we work hard on getting our readers the very best information we can. We figure that if we do a good job of informing you once, you’ll come back again the next time you have a question about cloud-related services. As transparency is the better part of credibility, on this page we’ll quickly explain how we make our money.

Cloudwards makes its money off affiliate commissions, which currently are the only viable way to make any real money with a site like ours. Ad-driven sites are on the way out, and we doubt anybody is going to take out a subscription on a review site, no matter how awesome it is. 

At Cloudwards, affiliate relationships work like so: we sign up to a program offered by a service or product (not all companies offer this, especially not bigger ones). We then insert a link into the text and then every time somebody signs up using that link, we get a cut. This commission, however, comes at no additional cost to you; it comes out of the provider’s end.

As you can imagine, this system, which is used by many websites, has come under a lot of criticism from consumers. It’s accused of slanting reviews and rankings toward certain providers, engendering bias and generally making things worse for people looking to buy stuff.

While many, many sites will omit critical information, make false claims or inflate and deflate rankings as they see fit, we avoid practices like that and write fair assessments. We take our role as consumer advocates seriously and aren’t going to help a poor service make you a few dollars poorer.

This isn’t just out of the goodness of our hearts, either: we figure that by being honest, we’ll get more people interested in reading our articles, which means more clicks in the end. Trustworthiness is its own reward.

In practice, this means that we write things as we see them, regardless whether or not a service has a deal in place with us or not. Just because a service is offering us good money doesn’t mean they automatically get the top spot — in fact, if the money is too good, we’ll likely get suspicious. If we rank a service high, it means it’s good; we’re in the business of recommending the right product to people, not hawking crud.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, and feel free to ask our chief editor any questions at fergus[at]commquer.com.