Earth Skater provides all the design, development and fully managed hosting services you need for “Your Complete Business Website” comprising an online store plus an optional blog and affiliate program. But you’ll pay the price.
Earth Skater was founded as a web design company in the year 2000, since when it has served more than 600 small businesses in the U.S. and elsewhere.
This business is in the business of getting your business online by designing, hosting, and fully managing your website. As such, it provides a range of services including web design and development, social media marketing, email marketing, pay-per-click management, and search engine optimization (SEO), in addition to web hosting.
Earth Skater has a nicely designed English-language website, which bodes well for the kind of website it will design, develop and host for you.
Earth Skater’s Microsoft Windows Server hosting solutions are offered as three plans: the Specialist plan (an online store plus up to 6 email accounts), the Pilot plan (an online store plus a blog plus up to 12 email accounts), and the Commander plan (an online store plus a blog plus plus an affiliate program plus up to 25 email accounts).
All the managed web hosting plans come with unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, and the following standard features:
Unlimited email accounts
Plesk control panel
Free domain name
Full HTTPS/SSL certificates
Free setup
CMS tools (Earth Skater or WordPress)
Website visitor statistics
MySQL/MSSQL databases
ASP, PHP support
The web hosting solutions are Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliant and support HTTPS with SSL certificates. Earth Skater also offers website backup services, but these only get a passing mention on the vendor’s website.
Pricing and Support
Earth Skater’s plans are very expensive as pure web hosting solutions, and possibly still expensive even when you factor in the web design element included in the monthly cost. Prices are listed in U.S. dollars, and you pay on a monthly billing cycle.
You get a 30-day money-back guarantee and a 99.999% server uptime guarantee.
Existing and prospective customers can contact Earth Skater’s 24/7 customer support team via telephone, contact form, or email, but there is no ticketing system. Unfortunately, I received no reply to my email as a prospective customer.
In terms of support resources, Earth Shaker provides a pretty good support page that answers a lot of questions, but the link to open the “website owner’s manual” leads only to an error page.
Earth Skater is in the business of providing you with a complete business website, with everything you need including an online store with an optional blog and affiliate program. But it’s not in the pure hosting business, so it’s hosting plans aren’t cheap, and it doesn’t do dedicated servers or VPS solutions.
Pros
Hosting solutions are PCI compliant
Flexible monthly billing cycles
30-day money-back guarantee
99.999% server uptime guarantee
Cons
No low-cost standalone hosting plans
No VPS or dedicated hosting solutions
Buy website design and fully managed hosting from Earth Skater.
Solomon Ndung'u
Solomon Ndung'u is a writer, author, and SEO specialist. When he's not working, you will find him singing his favorite tunes. He is also a confessed avid reader of The New York Times.
