One in five small businesses report they couldn’t survive a network outage costing just $10,000. That’s a crazy number!
I’ve spent 25 years working with small and mid-sized businesses, and the pattern is always the same. Owners calculate their lost sales from website downtime (if they even bother), shrug, and move on.
But the real damage is hiding in places they never think to look.
What Does Website Downtime Actually Cost?
Let me walk you through the math on this.
Say you run a $10 million dollar per year business with about 50 employees. Your systems go down for one business day. Most owners would look at lost revenue, ask their CTO some questions (maybe fire them), put together a plan to make sure it doesn’t happen again, and call it a day. But they’re not really looking at the full cost.
Here’s what’s really happening.
The hourly revenue loss is probably somewhere around $4,800. That’s just the sales you’re not making while your website is offline or your point of sale system is dead. Now add in payroll. Your team is still on the clock, but they can’t do their jobs. At average compensation rates, you’re burning another $1,800 per hour in productivity that’s going nowhere.
An eight hour outage? You’re looking at roughly $53,000 in combined losses. And that’s often before anyone has even started fixing the problem.
Here’s the thing that gets me: ITIC research from 2024 found that 6 in 10 businesses can’t even calculate their hourly website downtime costs. If you don’t know the number, you can’t make smart decisions about prevention.
The Hidden Costs of Website Downtime Everyone Forgets
Lost revenue and idle staff are just the start. I’ve watched businesses get hammered by the stuff that shows up after the outage is technically “fixed.”
Customer churn hits, and sometimes hard. People don’t forget when you couldn’t process their order or answer their call. Social media makes this worse now. One frustrated tweet during your website downtime can cost you customers you never knew you had.
Recovery costs pile up fast too. You’ll probably need outside help. Consultants, IT contractors, maybe new hardware. These folks don’t work cheap, especially when you’re calling them in a panic.
And if you’re in healthcare, finance, or legal? Compliance exposure is a real thing. HIPAA fines aren’t theoretical. Neither are the audits that follow a breach.
Why Small Businesses Are Prime Targets
The Verizon 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report had a finding that floored me. Small and mid-sized businesses experienced ransomware-related breaches at 88%, compared to just 39% for large enterprises!
Read that again. SMBs get hit more than twice as often.
Why is this? Attackers know smaller businesses typically have weaker incident response, slower patch cycles, and under-resourced security teams. They’re softer targets.
This means your risk of extended website downtime from a security incident is actually higher than it is for the big companies with dedicated IT departments.
How to Calculate Your Real Exposure
Here’s a simple formula you can use right now:
- Take your annual revenue and divide it by 2,080 (that’s roughly your total work hours in a year).
- Then add up what you’re paying affected employees per hour, and multiply that by 0.75 (assuming they lose about three quarters of their productivity during an outage).
- That’s your hourly website downtime cost.
- Multiply by eight for a full day.
The number will probably be a lot higher than you expected.
What Actually Works (And What Doesn’t)
I’ve seen a lot of bad advice floating around about “decoupling” your systems. Running email on one platform and hosting on another, that kind of thing. Sounds smart in theory, but it can create a nightmare when you’re trying to scale. You end up managing two separate ecosystems and doubling your maintenance headaches.
What does work is redundancy for a small business. Not complicated, expensive enterprise failover systems. Just practical backup layers that keep you running when something goes wrong.
For internet, have a backup. A mobile hotspot with a decent data plan costs maybe $50 a month. When your ISP goes down, you’re not dead in the water.
For critical data, use automatic cloud backups to a different ecosystem. If you’re hosting in Kinsta, do a backup to AWS. Not the “I’ll remember to do it manually” kind. The kind that runs whether you think about it or not. A consultant can easily set this up for you.
For communication, have a fallback. If your main phone system dies, can customers still reach you somehow? A forwarding number, a cell phone, something.
The businesses that actually gain customers during outages (yes, this happens) are the ones who thought about this stuff beforehand. When your competitor’s website is down and you’re still answering the phone, people notice.
The Hybrid Model
The answer isn’t choosing between cloud and local. It’s having both.
Cloud systems give you growth and efficiency. Local backups give you resilience. That’s the balance that actually works for small businesses that can’t afford to gamble on uptime.
I keep telling clients: website management should cost about 1-3% of your monthly website-generated revenue. That’s roughly one third the cost of going down for one day. When you frame it that way, the math gets pretty obvious.
Start Here
My recommendation? Start by calculating your actual hourly website downtime cost using the formula above. Once you have that number, you’ll know exactly how much prevention is worth.
Then pick one thing from the redundancy list and implement it this week. A mobile hotspot. Automatic backups. A backup email provider on different infrastructure.
The goal isn’t perfection. The goal is to be better prepared tomorrow than you are today.
Author Bio:
Jason Long is the founder and CEO of JHMG and SupportMy.Website. He is a serial problem solver and entrepreneur with 25 years of experience in business building. Jason’s ventures range from agriculture to healthcare with a focus on web-based technology. He has extensive experience in software development and has operated as a developer, UX designer, graphic designer, project manager, director, executive coach, and CEO. At JHMG, he operates not only as the leader of the organization but also as a SaaS Consultant helping businesses start, build, grow, scale, and exit their SaaS businesses.
Jason is also an experienced world traveler who regularly visits destinations worldwide and is passionate about community growth, social issues, fitness, and family.
Jason Long’s LinkedIn | Website: JasonMLong.me | X: @jasonmlong