Downtime Cost Calculator
Price an outage in dollars: lost revenue plus idle staff time per minute of downtime, and what your provider's SLA leaves you exposed to over a year.
Per-minute cost = lost revenue ($2.31/min) + unproductive staff cost ($12.50/min). Compare providers by multiplying their SLA's allowed downtime by your per-minute cost — a cheaper plan with a weaker SLA often costs more in expected losses.
What downtime actually costs
The visible cost is lost revenue: monthly online revenue divided by the ~43,200 minutes in a month gives your revenue-per-minute baseline. The hidden cost is people: engineers firefighting, support handling tickets, and staff who can't work without the system — their fully-loaded hourly cost keeps accruing during the outage.
Industry surveys put average downtime cost for small-to-mid businesses in the hundreds to thousands of dollars per minute; for e-commerce during peak periods it's far higher. Reputation and SEO effects come on top and aren't in the math here.
Using this to choose a provider or SLA tier
Multiply each provider's allowed downtime (from their SLA) by your per-minute cost. A plan that's $50/month cheaper but allows 3 extra hours of downtime per year is a bad trade for any business whose downtime costs more than ~$25/hour. This is also how to justify redundancy spending: if an hour costs you $5,000, a $200/month failover setup pays for itself preventing one incident every two years.
Frequently asked questions
How do I calculate downtime cost?
Downtime cost per minute = (monthly online revenue ÷ 43,200 minutes) + (affected employees × loaded hourly cost ÷ 60). Multiply by the outage length in minutes.
What does one hour of downtime cost on average?
It scales with revenue: a store doing $100k/month online loses about $139/hour in revenue alone, plus staff costs. Large enterprises commonly cite $100k+ per hour.
Do SLA credits cover downtime losses?
Almost never. Typical SLA credits refund a percentage of your monthly hosting fee — tens or hundreds of dollars — while your actual business loss can be orders of magnitude larger.
How can I reduce downtime cost?
Uptime monitoring with instant alerts cuts detection time; a status page cuts support load; redundancy (multi-AZ, failover DNS, CDN) cuts frequency. Prioritize by comparing each measure's cost to your per-minute loss.
This tool provides estimates for educational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice.