Hosting & Support SLA (Service Level Agreement)

Service Level Agreement (SLA)

434 Marketing & Consulting – Website Hosting, Maintenance, and Retained Support

Last Updated: August 22, 2026
Client Access Portal: portal.hellobonsai.com/u/434-marketing-consulting/client
Rates Effective: October 1, 2026

1. Purpose and Scope

This Service Level Agreement (SLA) outlines the services, expectations, and commitments between 434 Marketing & Consulting and our clients for website hosting, maintenance, and optional support services. This SLA is designed to provide transparency and guide clients in how to request support and understand what’s included in their plan.

2. Office Hours & Response Expectations

• Standard office hours are Monday–Friday, 9:00 AM–5:00 PM ET, excluding holidays.
• Send requests through the client portal: Bonsai. Everything gets logged there and stays visible to you.
• We work tickets in the order they arrive, with two exceptions. Anything urgent as defined in Appendix B jumps the line. Priority Support clients start ahead of the general queue.
• You’ll know what something costs before we start anything billable. No surprise invoices.

 

3. Support Ticket Process

Every request becomes a ticket, including the ones that arrive as a phone call or a one-off email.

Support Lifecycle:

• You send the request through the portal.
• We confirm we have it, tell you whether your plan covers it, and quote it if it does not.
• We do the work, and a second person checks it before it goes live.
• We send it back for your review. If something is not right, tell us on the ticket and we will adjust it.
• We close the ticket and tell you what changed.

All requests go through the client portal at portal.hellobonsai.com. There is no support email address to send to, which keeps every request in one place where you can see its status.

If your site is down or you think it has been compromised, do not open a regular ticket. Follow the instructions in Appendix B instead.

4. Scope of Support

WEBSITE HOSTING & CARE

Almost every site we look after is on Site Care. Here’s what each plan covers.

Feature / Service	Site Care $159/mo ($165/mo in 2027)	Hosting Only $52.50/mo ($55/mo in 2027)
Managed Hosting	✔️ Included	✔️ Included
Security monitoring	✔️ Advanced	✔️ Standard
Plugin and Core Updates	✔️ Included	❌
Automatic Rollback on Failed Updates	✔️ Included	❌
Restore from Backup	✔️ Included	Billed at $225/hour
Hack cleanup & recovery	✔️ Included	Billed at $225/hour

For our clients in need of additional storage or bandwidth, there is a +$55 add on required. See Appendix A. Most sites do not need it, and we check your actual usage before your first invoice so the $55 either applies or it does not.

Plan Details

CARE | $159/mo

Site Care includes:

• Managed hosting, plugin and core updates, WordPress core maintenance
• Nightly monitoring, automatic rollback when an update goes wrong, security monitoring
• Backup management and restores
• Hack cleanup, subject to Appendix B

Site Care does not include:

• Search performance and analytics work, which is Growth in Section 7
• Content edits, design changes and development work, which is Priority Support in Section 7
• New features or site sections which requires one-time project quote, see Project Rates in Section 7

HOSTING | $52.50/mo

Hosting only includes

• Hosting. 

If you are on hosting only, hack cleanup is billed hourly if you need it. 

What requires an add-on service or project quote:

• Anything in the “does not include” lists above
• Remediation of technical problems that existed before your plan started
• Work caused by a third party changing something we don’t control
• New builds, redesigns, migrations and integrations

5. Emergency & Out-of-Hours Support

An emergency is a critical website issue outside office hours. Appendix B defines exactly what we treat as urgent, and that list applies whether it’s Tuesday morning or Saturday night.

• If your site is down or compromised, contact us and say so plainly. Don’t wait for Monday.
• Urgent work is billed at the standard rates in Section 7 unless your plan covers it.
• If the outage is on our hosting provider’s side rather than your site, fixing it is on us and we don’t bill for it.*

*Our hosting runs on WP Engine. Datacenter and provider-level outages are theirs to fix and ours to chase, so you do not have to. That is what managed hosting is for.

6. Training & Resources

• A walkthrough of your site and how to make the edits you’ll want to make yourself. We’d rather you could.
• Written documentation for anything custom we built, kept with your account.
• A video training playlist covering the edits clients ask about most: YouTube training playlist

7. Optional Add-On Services

All optional. All work with either plan.

GROWTH | $495/mo

Growth merges your data into one place, with a live dashboard, and four times a year a strategist reviews all of it and writes up what it means.

On the technical side, we run a recurring site audit, fix the on-page items that affect how search engines and AI assistants read your site, keep titles and meta descriptions current, resolve crawl and indexing problems, and confirm that AI crawlers are not blocked from content you want them to find.

• A dashboard your team can open any time, connected to Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Semrush
• Technical SEO and AI search readiness, kept up on a quarterly cycle
• A written quarterly review, plus an optional 30-minute strategy call
• Monitoring between cycles

Growth covers the technical health of your site and the measurement of its performance. It doesn’t include writing content, redesigning pages, or running ads.

Growth and add-ons	Price
Growth	$495 /mo
Social reporting, up to 3 connected accounts	$30 /mo
Each additional social account	$10 /mo
Site Assessment, before Growth starts	$495 one-time, credited
Technical remediation, only if the assessment finds it’s needed	From $995, fixed price

PRIORITY SUPPORT | $290/mo+

Support hours, reserved monthly, at a better rate than one-off work. Your requests start ahead of the general queue.

Plan	Hours per month	Price	Effective rate
Priority Support 2	2 hours	$290/mo	$145/hr
Priority Support 5	5 hours	$575/mo	$115/hr
Priority Support 10	10 hours	$1,025/mo	$102.50/hr

• Hours do not roll over. Each month starts fresh.
• Content, design, bug fixes and development all draw from your hours. There are no work-type exclusions.
• Overage bills at the project rates below, at the same rate everyone pays. There are no client-specific overage rates.

PROJECT SUPPORT | One-time project pricing

Type of work	Rate
Development or design	$195 /hour
Content edits	$150 /hour
Hack cleanup or restore, hosting-only sites	$225 /hour
Larger projects	Priced per project

Reserved hours cost less per hour and go first. Project work costs full rate and waits its turn. If you only need us once or twice a year, project work is the cheaper answer and you should take it.

LISTINGS MANAGEMENT | From $39 per month

If you’ve moved, rebranded or merged, your old details are almost certainly still live somewhere. We manage your business information across the search engines, maps and directories so there’s one source of truth. Priced per location on a 12-month term, with a network audit first so the count is real rather than estimated. Ask us for a quote.

8. Summary

Pick a plan for where your site lives. Add what you need beyond that, and nothing you don’t. We look before we quote, we tell you what things cost before we do them, and when we think you should spend less with us, we say so.

These rates take effect October 1, 2026 and replace everything published before.

Thank you for trusting 434 Marketing & Consulting.

Appendix A

Hosting Tiers Specifications

Tier 1, included in both plans

• Up to 10GB storage
• Standard bandwidth and visit allowance

Tier 2, add $55 per month

• Up to 25GB storage
• Unlimited bandwidth and visits

We check your actual usage before your first invoice and again if your site grows. We won’t add Tier 2 to a site that doesn’t need it.

Appendix B

Urgent Support Specifications

An urgent website issue is defined as:

• Your website is not accessible.
• A portion of your website isn’t working properly.
• Your website is clearly hacked. You see code snippets, inappropriate content, or similar.
• You suspect your website is hacked.
• You suspect there are bad actors logged into your website.
• There is content on your site you did not add.
• You need to promptly remove a user’s login access.
• You have an urgent need to add a site-wide notice.

 

If any of these is true, tell us and say it’s urgent. You will not be wrong for asking.

When we cover the cleanup

On Care, we maintain your plugins. So if a bad actor got in through a plugin that was ours to keep current, cleaning and restoring the site is on us. Up to three (3) hours with no invoice.*

*Past three hours, or when the way in was something else, cleanup is billed at $225 per hour. Things that sit outside this: a password shared, reused or guessed, a compromised computer on your end, a plugin or integration you installed and manage yourself, or a site on hosting only where we aren’t maintaining updates.

Appendix C

Third-Party Developer Fees (ie plugin licenses) 

There are two types of third-party developer licenses: those covered by 434 Marketing & Consulting, and those requested for additional functionality. Unless your SOW says otherwise, developer licenses are included in the build and in the ongoing support covered under your managed hosting plan. Some websites need additional developer tools to support form and function.

Developer licenses, included

Most plugins and developer tools we use when building a website have licenses held at the agency level. 434 Marketing & Consulting owns, operates and manages these, and you do not pay for them separately, unless you move your hosting from 434. A list will be provided and active licenses removed during your transition to a new host.

Developer tools, individual license

Some websites are built using additional developer tools that require an individual license for ongoing functionality or access to version updates. These fees are agreed before use, never after. There are two ways to handle billing and account management.

• Client managed: you hold the account and share API keys or credentials as needed. You manage the monthly or annual fee.
• 434 managed: we manage the account, integration keys and billing. We add a 5% processing fee on top of the raw cost to cover credit card and processing fees.

The 5% covers the cost of moving the money. It is not a markup. If you would rather hold the license yourself, that is a reasonable choice and it costs you less.