Measuring the Cost of Downtime
Understanding how much an outage costs helps justify investments in resilience and DDoS protection.
Investments in redundancy, DDoS protection and stronger SLAs are easier to justify when you know what downtime actually costs. Many businesses underestimate it.
Direct revenue loss
For e-commerce and online services, lost sales during an outage are the most visible cost. Estimate average revenue per hour during peak and normal periods.
Productivity loss
Employees unable to work still get paid. Multiply affected staff by hourly cost and the duration of outages.
Recovery costs
Overtime, emergency support, consultants and additional infrastructure all add up.
Customer impact
Customers may abandon purchases, switch to competitors or lose trust. Long-term churn can exceed immediate losses.
Contractual penalties
Outages may breach your own SLAs with customers, triggering penalties.
Reputational damage
Public outages attract attention on social media and in the press.
Calculating a simple estimate
Downtime cost per hour = lost revenue + productivity cost + recovery cost + estimated customer impact.
Using the estimate
Compare the annual expected cost of outages with the cost of protection measures. Often, preventing even one significant outage justifies the investment.
Prioritise systems
Different systems have different costs. Protect the most expensive ones first.
Revisit regularly
As your business grows, downtime costs increase. Update estimates annually.
The bottom line
Knowing your downtime costs turns resilience from an IT expense into a clear business decision.
Learn more about DDoS Business Protect from UbiFi, or talk to our team.
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