"The internet's down" sounds like an annoyance until you price it out. For many businesses, an hour offline costs far more than a year of backup internet. Here's how to find your number.
The Costs People Count
The obvious one is lost productivity: staff who can't work. Multiply the number of affected employees by their loaded hourly cost by the hours down. That alone is often eye-opening.
The Costs People Forget
- Lost revenue: if you take orders, payments, or bookings online, downtime stops sales outright.
- Customer impact: missed calls, abandoned carts, and damaged trust that outlast the outage.
- Recovery time: the scramble to catch up after service returns.
- SLA-sensitive operations: for clinics, retail POS, or dispatch, downtime can halt the core business.
Do the math: (employees affected \xC3\x97 hourly cost \xC3\x97 hours) + lost revenue per hour. Compare that single number to ~$50\xE2\x80\x93$120/month for a backup connection. The case for redundancy usually makes itself.
What to Do With the Number
Once you know your hourly cost of downtime, you can right-size protection: a backup circuit with automatic failover for most, or diverse carriers and SD-WAN for the highest-stakes sites. See how redundancy and failover work and what an SLA guarantees.
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