An outage costs three things: hours your people cannot work, work they must redo, and sales you miss. Put in your own numbers to see all three.
How the math works
- Lost staff time: people affected × loaded hourly cost × hours down.
- Rework: people affected × loaded hourly cost × hours of work to redo.
- Lost revenue: revenue per hour × hours down.
- One outage: the sum of the three.
- A year: one outage × outages per year.
With the defaults, one outage costs $9,000 + $4,500 + $4,000 = $17,500, and a year with 1 outage costs $17,500.
Downtime cost questions, answered
What is a loaded hourly cost?
It is what an hour of a person’s time really costs you: pay plus benefits, payroll taxes and a share of overhead such as rent and software. Ask your bookkeeper for last year’s total payroll and overhead, divide it by the hours your staff worked, and use that figure. A rough number is fine for this.
Why count rework separately from hours down?
Because a restore brings data back only to the last good copy, and everything since then has to be done again. If the backup ran at midnight and the server fails at 3 p.m., the day’s work is gone. Hourly versions shrink that number, which is what a recovery point (how much work you could lose) measures.
What does the calculator leave out?
It leaves out overtime to catch up, outside recovery fees, contract penalties and customers who quietly go elsewhere. Those costs are real but hard to estimate honestly, so we leave them for you to add. Treat the result as the least an outage is likely to cost, not the most.
How do we bring the number down?
Shorten the hours down and the hours to redo. A tested restore tells you your real recovery time before you need it, and Standby Recovery can run a failed server in the cloud, with a target of 4 hours. Hourly versions on Workstation Backup cut the work to redo.
Shorten the next outage
A free 45-minute backup check reviews what you copy today and runs one test restore, with a written page of findings.