Technical care and SLA

Administration is a list of tasks: update, back up, check uptime. Care is an agreement to deliver them — with a plan, a response time, reporting and accountability for the outcome. The difference shows up during an incident: with administration you hear "that was not in scope", with care you have a documented response time and a recovery procedure. The second difference is initiative: administration waits for a ticket, care watches the system and reports problems before your customers notice them.

Updates of the core, plugins, modules and themes — always on staging first, never straight to production. Backups with periodic restore tests, because a backup you never restored is not a backup. Monitoring of uptime, errors and load times with alerts. Security: vulnerability patches, permission reviews, protection against unauthorised access. Small fixes and content changes within the plan hours. A monthly report covering the work done and the state of the system.

The basic plan covers updates, backups, monitoring and small fixes — from 300 PLN net per month for a site and 400 PLN for a store. The standard plan adds a faster response time, a block of hours for changes and a quarterly performance and security review. A development retainer with SLA and a full hour block starts at 2 000 PLN net per month — for stores and applications that evolve continuously. Response time depends on the plan and ranges from 4 hours in urgent mode to 2 business days.

I regularly take over care from other contractors. I start with an inventory: hosting, domain and panel access, the plugin and module list, verification of code ownership, backup state and PHP and core versions. Only then do I clean up the environment: removing unnecessary extensions, configuring staging, enabling monitoring and establishing an update cycle. If a previous contractor withholds access, I help establish who owns the domain and the code and recover control of the project.

The scope is tailored to the platform. For WordPress that means core, plugin and theme updates, security and plugin clean-up. For PrestaShop — module updates, database and cache performance, and correct marketplace and carrier integrations. For Laravel applications — dependency updates, regression tests, queue and scheduler monitoring, log reviews. In every case the same rule applies: changes go through staging, and the state of the system is measured rather than judged by feel.