Website downtime cost calculator: what are outages costing you?
Enter your revenue, traffic, and uptime to see hourly and annual downtime costs with uptime comparison and recommendations.
Calculate your downtime cost
Enter your business details to see how much website outages are costing you.
Total revenue generated through your website
Average monthly unique visitors
Step 1 of 2 - Business info
How the downtime cost calculation works
This calculator estimates the financial impact of website downtime based on your annual online revenue, business type, and current uptime level. The core formula is simple: revenue per hour × hours of downtime per year. We adjust the revenue impact based on your business type since not all businesses lose revenue at the same rate during outages.
Revenue impact by business type
| Business Type | Revenue Impact | Why |
|---|---|---|
| E-commerce | 100% of hourly revenue | Every minute of downtime = lost sales |
| SaaS / Web App | 100% | Users can't access the product; churn risk increases |
| Lead Generation | ~30% | Leads have delayed value; some return later |
| Content / Media | ~20% | Ad revenue lost, but lower per-visit value |
| Marketplace | 100% | Both buyers and sellers affected |
The hidden costs of downtime
Direct revenue loss is only part of the picture. Downtime also causes customer trust erosion (40% of users won't return after a bad experience), SEO penalties (Google reduces crawl rate for unreliable sites), support cost spikes (ticket volume surges during and after outages), and team productivity loss (engineers debugging instead of building).
Uptime levels explained
| Uptime | Downtime/Year | Downtime/Month | Common For |
|---|---|---|---|
| 99.99% | 53 minutes | 4.3 minutes | Enterprise SaaS, financial services |
| 99.95% | 4.4 hours | 22 minutes | Production web apps, e-commerce |
| 99.9% | 8.8 hours | 44 minutes | Standard business websites |
| 99.5% | 44 hours | 3.6 hours | Budget hosting, shared servers |
| 99% | 88 hours | 7.3 hours | Unreliable hosting, no redundancy |
What this calculator doesn't account for
This is a directional estimate, not a guarantee. It doesn't factor in partial outages (degraded performance), time-of-day revenue distribution (peak hours cost more), or indirect costs like brand damage and customer lifetime value loss. Use it to build a business case for infrastructure investment - then validate with real monitoring data.
Frequently asked questions
- How do you calculate downtime cost?
- Annual online revenue divided by hours per year gives you revenue per hour. Multiply that by your estimated annual downtime hours. We adjust for business type since not all revenue is equally affected by outages.
- What's a good uptime percentage?
- 99.9% (about 8.8 hours of downtime per year) is the standard for most businesses. E-commerce and SaaS companies should aim for 99.95% or higher.
- How do I know my current uptime?
- Use a monitoring tool like UptimeRobot (free), Pingdom, or Better Uptime. They check your site every 1 to 5 minutes and alert you to outages.
- What causes website downtime?
- Server failures, traffic spikes, DNS issues, expired SSL certificates, failed deployments, DDoS attacks, and hosting provider outages.
- How do I improve my website uptime?
- Use a CDN, implement redundant infrastructure, set up automated failover, monitor proactively, and choose reliable hosting. Managed cloud providers typically offer better uptime than shared hosting.
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