Understanding and Estimating the Costs of Server Downtime

The majority of website owners understand that server downtime is an issue at one time or another. It is not uncommon for businesses to experience such downtimes during procedures such as server upgrades and maintenance. Many website owners, however, do not realize that their businesses are being impacted by unneeded and unnecessary downtime that can be caused by things like hardware failure, overloads, human errors and cascading failures. Not only is this unnecessary downtime an issue, but it’s an issue that can cost a company a significant amount of money. To understand why it is so important to minimize server downtime, you need to understand exactly how these periods of time are costing your company money and impacting your bottom line.

Just how does server downtime cost your company money?

Lost Profits

There are a number of ways in which server downtime can result in lost profits for your business. Not being able to take incoming sales is only one way in which your site may be losing revenue during server outages. If you have a sales team that uses your company’s server to gather the contact information of potential customers, those team members will be unable to do their jobs and won’t be bringing in sales for your company while your servers are down.

The costs of resolving the issues caused by server downtime must also be addressed when calculating how much the downtime is costing your company. If labor is involved with fixing the problem, the fix can take anywhere from hours to days. The cost of this labor comes right out of your bottom line, directly impacting the profits of your business.

Damage to Your Company’s Reputation

There’s no doubt about it – server downtime can damage your company’s reputation. When you experience server slowdowns or downtime it can have a significant impact on your customers. If downtime causes your company to be late in delivering orders or interferes with your customers’ ability to place an order or contact your company, the downtime will put your company’s reputation directly at risk.

Reduced Productivity

Efficient business owners understand that employee productivity has a direct impact on the company’s bottom line. Payroll is usually one of a business’s largest expenses. Because of this, it is crucial that everyone who works for your company has the tools they need in order to remain productive. When the technology that provides the necessary tools is not available due to issues with server downtime, productivity is lost and so are company profits.

Calculating the Cost of Server Downtime

So exactly how much does server downtime cost, taking all of the above factors into consideration? The amount that downtime costs your company depends on a number of factors. As a general rule, you can expect downtime to cost your company anywhere from $500 to $1,500 per hour. The exact cost will vary depending on the size of your business and how much your business operations rely on your servers.

To get a more accurate picture of how much downtime is costing your company you need to know exactly how much downtime you are experiencing. How do you find out how much downtime your servers are experiencing?

Monitoring Server Downtime

The only way to know exactly how much downtime your servers are experiencing is to use a website monitoring service. A website monitoring service can provide you with specific details regarding any server outages and slowdowns that your website may be experiencing. Once you know how much downtime your company is experiencing, you can begin to take measures to address the issue. While every company will experience some server downtime, the key is to keep the downtime minimal. If you are experiencing anything less than 99.9 percent uptime, you need to start looking into solutions to resolve the problem. These solutions may include measures such as moving to a dedicated server or performing a server upgrade.