Website Outage Cost
What does website downtime cost?
When a website goes down, the meter that matters is lost revenue, not the size of your hosting bill or any SLA credit. Because online sales are the dominant cost, website downtime scales almost linearly with your hourly online revenue: a store earning $10,000 an hour loses about $10,000 in direct sales for every hour it is offline, plus recovery and reputation cost on top. This page gives the per-minute math, worked examples by revenue tier, and the uptime-percentage table that hosting SLAs are really promising.
The short answer
The cost of website downtime is your hourly online revenue times the length of the outage, plus recovery and reputation cost. A small business site typically loses $400 to $500 per minute (Pingdom benchmark); a large enterprise averages $23,750 per minute (ITIC 2024); and at the extreme, Amazon.com's 2013 outage cost an estimated $66,240 per minute (Forbes). Use the calculator below to model your own site.
Revenue Lost by Outage Length
What a website outage costs by hourly online revenue
The figures below are direct revenue lost only: hourly online revenue multiplied by the outage fraction. They are the floor, not the full cost. Add recovery labor and reputation or churn cost, which for consumer-facing sites commonly adds 1.5x to 5x on top, because some customers who hit an error page do not return.
| Site | Hourly online revenue | 15-min outage | 1-hour outage | 4-hour outage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Small store / blog | $1,000/hr | $250 | $1,000 | $4,000 |
| Growing ecommerce | $10,000/hr | $2,500 | $10,000 | $40,000 |
| Mid-market ecommerce | $50,000/hr | $12,500 | $50,000 | $200,000 |
| Peak / flash sale | $100,000/hr | $25,000 | $100,000 | $400,000 |
| Amazon.com (2013) | ~$3.97M/hr | $993,600 | $3.97M | $15.9M |
Direct revenue loss = hourly online revenue x outage length. Amazon.com row from its 2013 outage, estimated at $66,240 per minute (about $3.97M per hour) on 2012 net sales, per Forbes. Figures USD, direct revenue only.
What Your Uptime SLA Really Promises
Uptime percentage, downtime per year, and annual loss
Most shared hosting and CDN SLAs guarantee 99.9% uptime. That sounds close to perfect, but it still allows nearly nine hours of downtime a year. The last column shows the expected annual revenue loss for a site earning $10,000 per trading hour, to make the jump between each tier concrete.
| Uptime | Downtime / year | Downtime / month | Loss @ $10K/hr |
|---|---|---|---|
| 99% (two nines) | 3d 15.6h | 7h 18m | $876,000/yr |
| 99.9% (three nines) | 8h 45.6m | 43.8m | $87,600/yr |
| 99.95% | 4h 22.8m | 21.9m | $43,800/yr |
| 99.99% (four nines) | 52.6m | 4.4m | $8,760/yr |
| 99.999% (five nines) | 5.26m | 26s | $876/yr |
Downtime allowances are exact (525,600 minutes per year x the outage fraction). Loss column assumes $10,000 per trading hour and that outages are distributed across trading time. Hosting SLA credits, when they apply, refund a slice of your hosting fee, not these losses. See why SLA credits do not cover it.
Beyond the Revenue Meter
Why website downtime costs more than lost sales
Lost sales
Transactions you cannot capture while the site is unreachable. The largest component for revenue-dense stores, though some sales are only deferred, not lost.
Recovery cost
Engineering overtime, incident response, and paid ad spend that ran while the landing page was down. Typically a small but real slice on top of lost sales.
Reputation and churn
Shoppers who hit an error page and buy elsewhere, plus SEO and trust damage from a visible outage. For consumer brands this can exceed the immediate sales loss.
Wasted paid traffic is the cost most often missed: if you spend on search or social ads that route to a page returning an error, that budget is spent with a near-zero conversion rate for the length of the outage. The full model behind the calculator is Total = (Lost Revenue + Recovery + Reputation) x Compliance Multiplier. See the full methodology.
Model Your Own Site
Website downtime cost calculator
Enter your revenue, industry, team size, SLA tier and outage length for a per-minute, per-hour and annual figure. For a pure ecommerce site, set the industry to Ecommerce so the at-risk percentage reflects transaction revenue. Runs in your browser, no sign-up.
Your Business
Churn risk is the hidden lever; SLA commitments trigger credits; B2B trust erosion
This outage would cost you
Cost Breakdown
Includes 8% regulatory/compliance multiplier for SaaS
Annual SLA Exposure
Expected downtime/year
8.8 hrs
(526 min) at 99.9% SLA
Annual downtime exposure
$78.3K
per year at this rate
Industry Benchmark Comparison
SaaS average (ITIC 2024)
$80.0K/hr
Your calculated rate
$8.9K/hr
Your cost is below the SaaS benchmark - typical for lower revenue density.
SLA credits won't cover this.
See how AWS, Azure, and GCP credit rules work against you.
Frequently Asked
Common Questions
How much does website downtime cost?
How do you calculate the revenue lost when a website is down?
What does 99.9% uptime mean in website downtime per year?
What is the most expensive website outage on record?
Does my hosting or CDN SLA cover website downtime losses?
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