Free calculator · by AlphaIT
IT Downtime Cost Calculator
What does it cost your business when the internet, email or server goes down? Enter a few numbers and see the cost of an hour, a day and a week, in dollars.
What causes downtime
The Outages Small Businesses Actually Have
Most downtime isn’t a dramatic hack. It’s ordinary things nobody was watching, and most of them can be prevented or shortened.
Internet outage
One internet line and no backup. A second connection with automatic failover keeps phones, email and cloud apps running.
Failed server or hard drive
Old hardware fails without warning. Monitoring spots failing drives early, and a tested backup shortens the outage. See how to test your backups.
A bad update
An update breaks a key app on every PC at once. Staged patching tests updates on a few machines first.
Ransomware
Files encrypted and systems locked, often for days. Immutable backups and a plan make the difference. Read what to do in a ransomware attack.
Hacked email account
A compromised mailbox can mean days of cleanup, warning clients and checking payments.
One critical PC
The reception or accounting PC dies, and so does billing. Spare hardware and good documentation get you back fast.
Why the number matters
Use It to Decide What’s Worth Fixing First
If an hour of downtime costs more than a year of a backup internet line, the decision makes itself. The same goes for monitoring, a newer server or tested backups.
Share the result with your partners or your bookkeeper. It turns “IT is an expense” into a number everyone can weigh against the risk.
Frequently asked questions
Downtime Calculator FAQs
About the numbers and what to do with them.
How do you calculate the cost of IT downtime?
Two parts: the wages you pay while people can’t work (staff × hourly cost × how much work stops), plus the sales that are lost for good (your revenue per open hour × the share that doesn’t come back). This calculator adds the two for an hour, a workday and a week.
What should I put for hourly cost per person?
Wage plus benefits and payroll costs. If you don’t know, use the average hourly wage and add about a fifth. It doesn’t need to be exact to be useful.
Why isn’t all of our revenue counted as lost?
Many sales aren’t lost, just delayed: clients call back or rebook. Set the “lost for good” percentage to match your business. A walk-in shop loses more than a firm with booked appointments.
What isn’t included?
Overtime to catch up, recovery and repair costs, missed deadlines and penalties, data you can’t get back, and clients who leave. So the real cost is usually higher than this estimate.
How can a small business reduce downtime?
Monitoring that catches problems early, tested backups, a second internet line, staged updates and a written recovery plan. Our managed IT service includes the monitoring and patching.
Is my data stored?
No. The calculator runs in your browser. If you share the link, the numbers are in the link itself, so only share it with people you’d tell anyway.
Free downtime risk review
Let’s Find Your Most Expensive Single Point of Failure
We’ll look at your internet, servers, backups and key PCs, and tell you what’s most likely to stop your business and what it would take to fix it.
780-318-0149
Edmonton, AB · serving the Edmonton region