How Much Does Website Downtime Really Cost?

By Author: Nate Rodney
Total Articles: 499
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The goal of a website monitoring service is to alert you the moment your website goes down. The idea behind this is that the sooner you know your site is experiencing downtime, the sooner you can go to work to get your site back up and running. After all, every minute of downtime equates to a loss of potential profits. Exactly how much downtime does the average site experience? Furthermore, how much does website downtime really cost? Numerous website owners have done the math and understand that the nominal cost of a quality website monitor is well worth the money that can be saved by minimizing potential website downtime. To understand why a website monitor is so important, you need to realize just how prevalent downtime really is and how much it can cost your company.

Even Fortune 500 Companies Go Down Online:

If you think it's just the smaller websites that are prone to website outages, you're sorely mistaken. Even the big Fortune 500 companies run into downtime on a regular basis. According to Dunn & Bradstreet, approximately half of all Fortune 500 companies experience at least 1.6 hours of downtime ...
... each and every week. That equates to about 80 hours of downtime per year. If every minute of downtime equates to lost profits, 80 hours of downtime equates to significant losses. If the Fortune 500 companies are going down, chances are that your site isn't doing much better.

How Much Money is Downtime Costing Your Company?

There are a number of factors that can impact just how much downtime actually costs a website. The size of the company is an obvious factor. Size, however, is not the only factor that determines how much of an impact downtime will have on your company's profits. Can your company still process orders when your site is offline? If your site operates exclusively on the Web, downtime is literally crippling. For Web-only businesses, downtime means you can't do a thing until your site is up and running again. Therefore, downtime is more critical to you than it is to a business that only conducts 25 percent of its transactions online.

The volume of your website's sales is another factor that determines how much money downtime will cost your business. If you average $5,000 in sales per hour, then every minute of downtime is costing your site over $80 a minute. If your site goes down during peak sales hours, this figure can go up drastically. When you compare the nominal cost of a website monitoring service to the losses that you may incur due to unnecessary downtime, it quickly becomes obvious that the cost of a website monitor is an investment and not just an ordinary business expense. The sooner you are notified of downtime, the sooner you can work to resolve it. A website monitoring service can help you minimize the downtime that your website experiences. This means that same service is also minimizing the lost profits that your site experiences due to website downtime.

Some Bandwagons Are Worth Jumping On:

The majority of successful websites already have website monitoring services in place, understanding the value of these services versus the cost. If you have yet to employ a website monitor to protect your site's uptime, now is the time to do so. You may be surprised at just how often your site is going down and there will be nothing you can do about the situation (and the lost money) until you are made aware of the problem and can fix the issues that are leading to your site's outages.

Alertra is a leading provider of website monitoring and alerting services. We monitor the availability and performance of Internet-connected devices. As part of Alertra website monitoring service, we provide timely alert notifications and access to detailed reporting. We offer monitoring service to all sizes of businesses right from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies.