The Real Cost of One Hour of Downtime for an SMB (Plus a Simple Calculator)
For a typical small or mid‑sized business, just one hour offline can burn $8k–$75k once lost revenue, wages and recovery work are counted. Know your number—then cut it to near‑zero with modern continuity tooling.
Why Downtime Cost Matters
Downtime isn’t just a blip on a monitoring dashboard; it’s the moment every interconnected part of the business grinds to a halt. Orders freeze mid‑checkout, consultants stare at loading icons instead of billable work, and production lines idle while wages and overhead keep ticking.
For smaller companies, the margin for error is slimmer than at the enterprise level. A single unplanned hour can erase a day’s profit or derail cash‑flow needed for next week’s payroll. Reputation also takes a direct hit: first‑time buyers rarely return to a site that timed‑out, and long‑standing customers vent their frustration on social channels within minutes.
When leadership sees the true financial arc lost revenue, wasted payroll, brand damage resilience shifts from a technical checkbox to a board‑level priority. Quantifying that exposure is the first step toward funding the safeguards that keep the lights on.
What Goes into the Calculation
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Lost Revenue – halted transactions, abandoned carts, delayed invoices.
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Paid Productivity – employees on the clock but unable to work.
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Recovery Expenses – overtime, consultants, replacement hardware.
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Intangible Impact – customer churn, SLA penalties, reputational damage.
The Formula & Worked Example
Downtime Cost = (Revenue/hr × % Impact) + (Employee Cost/hr × # Staff Affected) + Recovery Expenses + Intangibles
|
Metric
|
Value
|
|---|---|
|
Average revenue per hour |
$12,000 |
|
Revenue impact |
70 % |
|
Staff affected |
40 |
|
Average loaded wage per hour |
$45 |
|
Recovery services |
$3,000 |
|
Intangibles (est.) |
$2,500 |
Plugging in:
Downtime Cost = (12,000 × 0.7) + (45 × 40) + 3,000 + 2,500 = $14,300
One hour offline could wipe out two full days of net profit.
Hidden Costs Most Teams Miss
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• Legal exposure from breached SLAs or data‑loss regulations.
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• SEO setbacks: search engines demote consistently unavailable sites.
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• Employee morale: repeated outages drive talent turnover.
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• Opportunity cost: new feature releases stall while triage consumes dev cycles.
Industry Benchmarks
|
Sector
|
Avg. Cost/hr (SMB)
|
Primary Driver
|
|---|---|---|
|
E‑commerce |
$30k–$75k |
Missed transactions |
|
Professional services |
$10k–$25k |
Billable time lost |
|
Manufacturing |
$20k–$50k |
Halted production |
|
Healthcare |
$19k–$60k |
Compliance fines |
Estimate Your Own Cost: Step by Step
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Gather numbers: hourly revenue, headcount, average wage, SLA penalties.
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Assign realistic impact percentages for revenue and staff productivity.
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Add a buffer (10–20 %) for intangible damage.
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Run the formula for one hour, then multiply by your average outage length.
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Compare to prevention cost. If insurance is cheaper, you’re under‑protected.
Action Plan to Avoid the Bill
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• Map critical systems and rank by cost‑per‑hour if unavailable.
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• Automate backups & replication so recovery points stay fresh.
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• Schedule quarterly test restores your RTO lives or dies on practice.
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• Monitor proactively to stop incidents before they snowball.
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• Tap Sefthy’s instant cloud failover to reboot key services in under 10 minutes users stay productive and revenue keeps flowing.
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• Leverage Sefthy DeepVerify™ automated backup testing to guarantee every snapshot is bootable, eliminating restore‑day surprises.
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• Use Sefthy’s unified dashboard & smart alerts for one‑screen visibility across storage, backups and network health, so small issues never grow into full outages.
Ready to be Safe?
Try Sefthy for Free!
When you know precisely what an hour of silence costs, the case for robust continuity writes itself. Smart safeguards pay for themselves the first time they avert an outage.
Ready to protect your balance sheet?
Start a free 7‑day Sefthy trial and test your first automated failover today.