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What does an outage really cost you?
Work out what downtime costs per minute, hour, incident, month and year from your own revenue, team and outages, with every formula shown.
What downtime costs you
- Per minute
- €40
- Per hour
- €2,400
- Per incident (1h)
- €2,400
- Per month (1h)
- €2,400
- Per year
- €28,800
| Breakdown | Per month | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| Lost revenue | €2,400 | €28,800 |
| Lost productivity | €0 | €0 |
| Overhead | €0 | €0 |
| Total | €2,400 | €28,800 |
Downtime costs about €40 a minute: €2,400 a month and €28,800 a year with 1h down a month.
The cheapest minutes to cut are the ones before anyone notices. Uptimecheck checks as often as every minute and confirms a failure with a second check before it alerts you.
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//_01 The nines in money
What 99.9% and 99.99% uptime mean for you
The downtime each uptime target allows, at your cost of €40 per minute. Going from 99.9% to 99.99% is worth €18,935 a year.
| Uptime | Downtime a month | Cost a month | Cost a year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 99% | 7h 18m 18s | €17,532 | €210,384 |
| 99.5% | 3h 39m 9s | €8,766 | €105,192 |
| 99.9% | 43m 49s | €1,753 | €21,038 |
| 99.95% | 21m 54s | €877 | €10,519 |
| 99.99% | 4m 22s | €175 | €2,104 |
| 99.999% | 26s | €18 | €210 |
Downtime is the most each target allows in an average month of 30.44 days, rounded down to the second.
//_02 How we calculate this
Every formula, from your numbers only
No industry averages and no assumptions about your business: each result comes from the numbers you enter, in this order.
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Revenue per hour
= revenue ÷ hours in the period
An hour is 1, a day 24, a month 730.5 and a year 8,766 hours. A year is 365.25 days and a month a twelfth of it, as in the uptime calculator.
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Lost revenue per minute
= revenue per hour × share lost ÷ 60
The share is the part of revenue that stops while the site is down and doesn’t come back later.
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Lost productivity per minute
= people affected × cost per person-hour ÷ 60
Everyone who can’t work, or who stops to fix it, for as long as the outage lasts.
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Overhead per minute
= (lost revenue + lost productivity) × overhead %
A rough allowance for the costs that follow an outage. 0% leaves it out.
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Cost per minute
= lost revenue + lost productivity + overhead
Per hour is 60 times that, per incident the cost per minute × minutes per incident.
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Downtime per month
= minutes per incident × incidents per month
At most a whole month (43,830 minutes). From an uptime %, it is (100 − uptime) % of a month, and per incident that divided by the number of incidents.
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Cost per month and year
= cost per minute × downtime per month, × 12 for a year
Amounts under 10 are shown with cents, larger ones rounded to whole units. Nothing is converted between currencies.
What the calculator leaves out
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Customers who don’t come back
Some visitors who hit an error page buy elsewhere next time, and repeated outages lead to cancellations. That loss lands in later months, so it isn’t in the cost per minute; the overhead % is the place for an estimate.
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Contract penalties
If you promise your own customers an uptime, an outage can owe them credits. They depend on the contract, not on minutes, so add them to the overhead or count them separately.
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Time of day
The calculator assumes every minute of downtime costs the same. Outages at peak cost more and outages at night less in revenue, but night outages often last longer because nobody notices.
Where the minutes go
An outage has three parts: the time until someone knows, the time to find the cause and the time to fix it. The first is often the longest, at night and at weekends, and the cheapest to shorten. The guide walks through two worked examples and the hidden costs in more detail.
Questions
How do I calculate the cost of downtime?
Divide your online revenue per hour by 60 for the revenue lost per minute, and count only the share that is really lost while the site is down. Add the cost of the people who can’t work or who fix it, and an allowance for support, wasted ads and refunds. Multiply the cost per minute by the minutes your site is down.
What is the difference between 99.9% and 99.99% uptime in money?
99.9% allows 43 minutes and 49 seconds of downtime in an average month, 99.99% only 4 minutes and 22 seconds. At €40 a minute (€2,400 an hour), that is €1,753 against €175 a month, or €21,038 against €2,104 a year.
Why doesn’t the calculator use an industry average?
Averages per minute are usually drawn from surveys of large companies and range widely between businesses, so they say little about yours. Your own revenue, team and outage history give a number you can act on, and the formulas on this page show exactly how it is reached.
Does downtime at night cost less?
Usually less in lost revenue per minute, but night outages often last longer because nobody notices until morning. A short outage at peak time and a long one at night can cost the same. If your revenue varies a lot over the day, use the revenue for the hours outages tend to happen.
How does monitoring reduce the cost of downtime?
It shortens the time until someone knows, which is often the longest part of an outage. Uptimecheck checks your site as often as every minute, confirms a failure with a second check and then alerts you, so the fix starts right away instead of when the first customer complains.
Let Uptimecheck keep watching
This free tool answers one question at a time. In Uptimecheck, the same work runs on its own and alerts you when something needs attention.
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