Website Downtime: What It Costs and How to Find Out Before Your Customers Do
Most owners learn their site is down from a customer, hours later. What an hour costs, what uptime percentages mean, and how to be told first, for free.
Dollar figures in this article are US dollars. Our Australian prices are on the pricing page.
The worst part of downtime is rarely the downtime. It is finding out at 4pm, from a customer, that the site has been unreachable since breakfast — and having no idea how many people tried in between.
Short version. Free monitoring will tell you within a minute or two of a site going down, and takes ten minutes to set up. There is no good reason for a business to learn this from a customer, and doing so is the part that actually damages the relationship.
Work Out Your Own Number
Downtime cost is usually discussed with big-company statistics that mean nothing to a five-person business. Your own figure takes two minutes:
- Monthly inquiries from the website. Say 20.
- Share that become customers. Say 25% — so 5 jobs.
- Average job value. Say US$900 — so US$4,500 a month from the site.
- Divide by working hours. About 160 a month, so roughly US$28 an hour of exposure.
A full day down is around US$225 of directly attributable lost work. Modest — which is why the direct number is not really the argument.
The costs that matter more are the invisible ones: a first-time visitor who tried once and called somebody else, an ad campaign spending on a dead page, and — if it recurs — search engines gradually crawling you less. A one-off hour is a nuisance. A pattern is a business problem.
What "99.9% Uptime" Actually Permits
Hosts advertise uptime percentages that sound identical and are not:
- 99% — up to 7 hours 18 minutes down a month.
- 99.9% — about 43 minutes a month.
- 99.99% — about 4 minutes a month.
So a host advertising "99.9%" is contractually allowed most of a working hour of outage every month. That is usually fine. What matters is the small print: most guarantees exclude scheduled maintenance, and the compensation is typically a credit against hosting fees rather than anything resembling your actual loss. A guarantee is a marketing figure, not insurance.
Set Up Monitoring in Ten Minutes
Free tiers of several monitoring services will check your site every minute or five from multiple locations and alert you by email, SMS or push. Set up:
- Your homepage, obviously.
- One deep page — a service page. Homepages are sometimes cached and served while the rest of the site is broken, so a homepage-only check can report everything fine while nothing else works.
- Your certificate expiry. The most common self-inflicted outage there is, and it is entirely predictable — see SSL and HTTPS explained.
- Alerts to more than one person, ideally including a phone.
Set the alert threshold to two consecutive failures rather than one. A single failed check is frequently a network blip, and monitoring that cries wolf gets muted, which is worse than no monitoring at all.
Our own Findable does uptime checks every few minutes with alerting after two consecutive failures, alongside the certificate watch — the free tier covers it, and every site on a care plan is monitored as standard.
Why Small Business Sites Go Down
In rough order of frequency:
- An expired certificate. Not technically down, but every visitor sees a full-page security warning, which is worse.
- An expired domain. Entirely preventable, occasionally catastrophic. Auto-renew, and check the card on file has not expired.
- A bad update. A plugin or theme update that conflicts. Argument for staging and for a backup before you change anything.
- Hitting a resource limit. Shared hosting throttling you, often after a traffic spike — the day your marketing works.
- A DNS change gone wrong. Often during a migration.
- Genuine host failure. Real, and the least common of these.
Notice that only one is the host's fault. Most downtime is self-inflicted and therefore preventable.
When It Happens
- Confirm it is really down and not just you — check from mobile data, or an external "is it down" checker.
- Check the certificate and the domain expiry. Two of the top causes, and both diagnosable in seconds.
- Check your host's status page before raising a ticket.
- Ask what changed. Nearly every outage follows a change — an update, a plugin, a DNS edit, a payment that failed.
- Say something. A post on your social account saying the site is down and giving a phone number takes a minute and preserves the inquiries you would otherwise lose entirely.
- Afterwards, ask why. A host that cannot explain an outage will have the same one again.
Reducing It
- Monitoring, so you are first to know.
- Auto-renew on the domain and the certificate, with a card that is not expiring.
- Updates tested on staging rather than live.
- Backups you have actually restored once.
- Hosting sized for your real traffic, not your average — see choosing hosting.
None of it is expensive. The whole list is an afternoon and then almost no ongoing attention, which is exactly why it tends not to get done until after the first bad morning.
Common Questions
How Much Does Website Downtime Cost a Small Business?
Work out your own figure: monthly website inquiries, multiplied by your conversion rate, multiplied by average job value, divided by about 160 working hours. For many small businesses that is roughly US$25 to US$50 an hour. The larger costs are indirect — first-time visitors who called a competitor, ad spend on a dead page, and reduced crawling if outages recur.
What Does 99.9% Uptime Actually Mean?
About 43 minutes of downtime per month. 99% allows over seven hours; 99.99% allows about four minutes. Most guarantees also exclude scheduled maintenance and compensate with a credit against hosting fees rather than your actual losses, so treat the figure as marketing rather than insurance.
How Do I Know If My Website Is Down?
Set up free uptime monitoring — it checks every minute or few from multiple locations and alerts you within a couple of minutes. Monitor a deep page as well as the homepage, because a cached homepage can serve fine while the rest of the site is broken, and alert after two consecutive failures rather than one.
What Is the Most Common Cause of Website Downtime?
An expired SSL certificate, which technically is not downtime but shows every visitor a full-page security warning — which is worse. After that: an expired domain, a bad plugin or theme update, hitting a shared hosting resource limit, and DNS changes during migrations. Genuine host failure is the least common.
What Should I Do When My Website Goes Down?
Confirm it is down for others and not just you, check the certificate and domain expiry, check your host's status page before raising a ticket, and ask what changed — nearly every outage follows a change. Then post on social with a phone number, which takes a minute and saves inquiries you would otherwise lose.
