Why? He also has slicehost affiliate link at the bottom.
Edit: I think you should point out, when you edit your original post, where you only mentioned Linode not slicehost. Thanks.
Edit: I think you should point out, when you edit your original post, where you only mentioned Linode not slicehost. Thanks.
In the same way I never batted an eyelid with David Welton's Slicehost vs. Linode[1] article. It was informativve and unbiased and I was happy to provide some incentive back for that.
[1: http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode ]
I (and most others hopefully) already knew about prgmr and EC2 has horrible performance, even before I saw this benchmark, the only one new to me is Rackspace performance numbers (BTW Rackspace owns slicehost).
I don't see any logic behind your objection.
Even with no conscious/devious intent, this sort of interest can bias the results. For example, what if the relative results could vary arbitrarily from week to week (especially possible with the neighboring load on VPS nodes)?
If you get a plausible result that shows the companies pay commissions do best, you are incented to publish right away. If you get a result that shows the non-commission-paying companies on top, you will dig deeper: maybe there are ways the commission-payers are better, in a longer analysis.
(It's similar to the publication bias in other research, which also requires no scheming intent, just natural behavior in response to incentives which are each alone reasonable.)
However, in this case, the author is not sponsored by or works for any VPS service. He provided affiliated links at the end of the article, where one of the linked service did not prove to be superior than the other according to his analysis. If he sneaked in an affiliated link within the article, the objection and skepticism could be somewhat justified (still I think its somewhat fair game).