How much does one hour of downtime cost your business?
If you can't answer that question immediately, you're not alone. Most companies dramatically underestimate the true cost of website outages — until they experience one.
In this guide, we'll break down exactly how to calculate your downtime costs, reveal the hidden expenses most people miss, and show you why uptime monitoring is one of the highest-ROI investments you can make.
The Simple Downtime Cost Formula
At its core, calculating downtime cost is straightforward:
Downtime Cost = (Revenue per hour) × (Hours of downtime) × (Impact percentage)
Let's break that down:
Revenue per hour
Take your annual online revenue and divide by 8,760 (hours in a year):
| Annual Revenue | Revenue per Hour |
|---|---|
| $100,000 | $11.42 |
| $500,000 | $57.08 |
| $1,000,000 | $114.16 |
| $5,000,000 | $570.78 |
| $10,000,000 | $1,141.55 |
Hours of downtime
The average website experiences 3-5 hours of unplanned downtime per year. Without monitoring, that number is often much higher — because you don't know about outages until customers complain.
Impact percentage
Not all downtime affects 100% of revenue. Consider:
- Full outage: 100% impact
- Degraded performance: 30-70% impact
- Regional outage: Impact based on regional traffic
- Specific feature down: Impact based on feature usage
The Hidden Costs Most Calculators Miss
The formula above only captures direct revenue loss. The real cost is much higher.
1. Lost productivity
When your site goes down, your team scrambles:
- Engineers drop everything to investigate
- Support staff handle angry tickets
- Sales can't demo the product
- Marketing campaigns get paused
Cost multiplier: 2-5x the direct revenue loss
2. Customer acquisition cost wasted
You paid to get visitors to your site — through ads, SEO, content marketing. When they arrive and your site is down:
- Paid ads: You're still paying for clicks that bounce
- SEO traffic: Visitors won't come back tomorrow
- Referral traffic: The person who referred them looks bad
If your customer acquisition cost is $50, and 100 visitors hit a down site, that's $5,000 wasted.
3. Customer lifetime value at risk
An existing customer who can't access your service doesn't just miss one transaction. They start questioning their choice. They look at competitors. They might not come back.
Industry data suggests:
- 22% of customers will leave after just one bad experience
- It costs 5-25x more to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one
4. SEO damage
Google monitors site availability. Extended or frequent outages can:
- Drop your search rankings
- Get your site temporarily de-indexed
- Reduce crawl frequency
- Lower your domain authority over time
The SEO impact can cost you traffic for months after the outage is resolved.
5. Brand reputation damage
Some costs can't be calculated:
- Negative social media posts
- Bad reviews mentioning reliability
- Lost trust with enterprise prospects
- Competitor screenshots of your error page
Real-World Downtime Cost Examples
Let's look at what downtime costs different types of businesses:
Small e-commerce store
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Annual revenue | $500,000 |
| Revenue per hour | $57 |
| Downtime (2 hours) | $114 |
| Hidden costs (3x) | $342 |
| Total cost | $456 |
Growing SaaS company
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Monthly recurring revenue | $100,000 |
| Revenue per hour | $137 |
| Downtime (2 hours) | $274 |
| Churn risk (1% of MRR) | $1,000 |
| Engineering time (4 hours × $150) | $600 |
| Total cost | $1,874 |
Enterprise e-commerce
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Annual revenue | $10,000,000 |
| Revenue per hour | $1,142 |
| Downtime (1 hour) | $1,142 |
| Hidden costs (4x) | $4,568 |
| Emergency response | $2,000 |
| Total cost | $7,710 |
The Compounding Cost of Slow Detection
Here's what most people miss: the cost of downtime is directly related to how fast you detect it.
Consider a 1-hour outage:
| Detection Method | Time to Detect | Total Downtime | Cost Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|
| Customer complaint | 45 minutes | 1 hour 15 min | 1.25x |
| Checking manually | 30 minutes | 1 hour | 1.0x |
| 5-minute monitoring | 5 minutes | 35 minutes | 0.58x |
| 1-minute monitoring | 1 minute | 31 minutes | 0.52x |
With 1-minute monitoring, you cut your downtime (and costs) nearly in half compared to waiting for customer complaints.
How to Calculate Your Specific Downtime Cost
Use this worksheet to calculate your numbers:
Step 1: Direct revenue impact
Annual online revenue: $________
÷ 8,760 hours = Revenue per hour: $________
× Average outage duration: ________ hours
= Direct revenue loss: $________
Step 2: Hidden cost multiplier
| Business Type | Multiplier |
|---|---|
| E-commerce | 3-4x |
| SaaS | 4-6x |
| Lead generation | 2-3x |
| Media/content | 2-3x |
| Enterprise B2B | 5-8x |
Direct revenue loss: $________
× Your multiplier: ________
= Total downtime cost: $________
Step 3: Annual exposure
Total downtime cost: $________
× Expected incidents per year: ________
= Annual downtime exposure: $________
The ROI of Uptime Monitoring
Now let's flip the equation. What does monitoring cost versus what it saves?
Without monitoring
- Average detection time: 30-60 minutes
- Average incidents discovered: 4-6 per year (many go unnoticed)
- No historical data for prevention
- Reactive, stressful incident response
With monitoring
- Detection time: 1-5 minutes
- All incidents captured, even brief ones
- Historical data helps prevent future issues
- Proactive, calm incident response
The math
For a business with $1,000,000 annual online revenue:
| Scenario | Annual Cost |
|---|---|
| Without monitoring (3 incidents × 2 hours × $114 × 3x multiplier) | $2,052 |
| With monitoring (3 incidents × 35 min × $114 × 3x multiplier) | $598 |
| Savings | $1,454 |
Even basic monitoring that costs $100-200/year delivers 7-15x ROI.
Beyond Cost: The Peace of Mind Factor
Some benefits don't show up in a spreadsheet:
- Sleep better knowing you'll be alerted instantly
- Vacation confidently with monitoring watching 24/7
- Build trust with customers through transparency
- Make better decisions with uptime data
- Prove reliability to enterprise prospects
What to Monitor for Maximum Protection
To minimize downtime costs, monitor:
Critical paths
- Homepage and landing pages — First impression for visitors
- Login and authentication — Users can't access their accounts
- Checkout/payment flow — Direct revenue impact
- Core API endpoints — Everything depends on these
- Database connectivity — Often the first thing to fail
Supporting infrastructure
- SSL certificates — Expiration causes instant "unsafe" warnings
- DNS resolution — No DNS = no website
- CDN and assets — Broken images and slow loads
- Third-party services — Payment processors, APIs, etc.
- Background jobs — Cron jobs and scheduled tasks
How Webalert Minimizes Your Downtime Costs
Webalert is built to detect issues fast and alert you instantly:
- 1-minute checks — Catch issues before customers notice
- Multi-channel alerts — Email, SMS, Slack, Discord, webhooks
- SSL monitoring — Never let a certificate expire
- Response time tracking — Catch slowdowns before they become outages
- Status pages — Keep customers informed automatically
- Incident history — Data to prevent future issues
The free plan monitors up to 5 endpoints with 10-minute checks. Paid plans offer 1-minute checks for faster detection.
See features and pricing for details.
Final Thoughts
Every minute of downtime costs money. The question isn't whether you can afford monitoring — it's whether you can afford not to have it.
Calculate your downtime costs. Compare them to the cost of monitoring. The ROI is almost always overwhelmingly positive.
Don't wait for your next outage to do the math.
Stop losing money to undetected downtime
Start monitoring for free with Webalert →
Explore features or see pricing.
Free forever. 1-minute detection. ROI from day one.