I absolutely agree, and DigitalOcean does it brilliantly.

I ran into a similar situation the other day trying to put together some apt packages in a way that was clearly off the beaten path. Found a company blog post that walked through pretty much exactly what I was trying to do.

The marketing portion of it? At the very very end of the article was "And here's the single command you'd need to run to do this with our tool." I didn't end up buying the tool because it didn't quite fit some other requirements I had, but it did very effectively get me looking at their product and evaluating whether or not it'd be good for me.

I never thought about it that way, but for sysadmin questions if I see a DigitalOcean article I always pick it. They are always high quality and they version them by major OS version (Ubuntu 18/20/22).

Maybe that's why I have droplets, they got me by providing a good well priced service. /s

You really don't need the /s on the end. It's not a given anymore that this is how commerce works.

Yup that's technically marketing but if it's an article I find useful then I win too.

The “Interrupt” blog by Memfault is another example. They are adored by embedded developers.

A similar example is Neptune.ai, with one of their comparison posts ranking top for almost every query about any MLOps tool. It is very effective for visibility; even if the posts’ quality is poor and marketing is a little aggressive.

Linode seemed really good about that, what changed?