A fairly common claim among website uptime monitoring services is that downtime costs $5600 per minute. Chances are, you’ll have one of two reactions to this claim:
- “Argh, that’s a lot! We should use uptime monitoring!”
- “That’s completely made up, no one running a business my size would tell you a number anywhere near this high”
The reality of what downtime costs your business lies somewhere in between.
As a company that runs 3.6 million uptime checks per week, we have a bit of insight into the cost of downtime, so if you’re curious – read on.
Why it’s not $5600 per minute
Let’s start with the obvious calculation: take your annual revenue, divide it by the number of minutes in a year, and there’s your cost per minute of downtime.
The formula for calculating your downtime cost per minute:
(annual revenue) / 60 * 24 * 365
This assumes 100% of your revenue comes from your website and your website being offline drops your revenue to 0, which are fairly strong assumptions to make.
For downtime to cost $5600 per minute by this measure, your business would need to be making $2.9 billion per year. That’s almost enough to make it into the Fortune 500.
How much does downtime really cost your business
Let’s say your business makes $1 million per year, and 100% of revenue com
