How Much Would Downtime Cost Your Business?

Your business infrastructure is important. Regardless of your industry, operational practices, or location, being connected is essential to your business’s success on a day-to-day basis.

So what do you do when you are knocked offline due to a cyberattack or data corruption? Does your current host have a 99.995% uptime guarantee like THG Hosting? If not, there are a few important aspects you need to address…

For example, do you have the proper procedures in place to handle worst-case scenarios? Do you have backup options available to access your data? Most importantly, do you know exactly how much downtime would cost you both short and long-term?

Learn more about being prepared for anything while proactively protecting your organization from facing downtime and creating a disaster recovery plan.

WHY DO BUSINESSES EXPERIENCE DOWNTIME?

It’s important to note that data disasters can occur for a multitude of reasons. Web host and ISP outages make up a small percentage of business downtime periods. Below we’ve listed the most common causes of downtime that affects business:

Cyberattack

Cyberattack includes all malicious attacks including malware, DDoS attacks, hacking, ransomware, and other outside influences that cause an outage.

Billing Issues

Billing mistakes can occur due to personnel changes, account issues, and even fraud. However, most often, we usually see that businesses simply forget to pay their invoice. There’s an easy solution, but a lot of damage can happen in the meantime.

Natural Disasters

While rare, downtime can be caused by tornadoes, hurricanes, and other forces of nature. Luckily, THG Hosting has hand-picked our data center locations based on the safety of the surrounding geographic area. We try to ensure that we are out of flood zones and in the safest locations possible.

User Error

As the most frustrating reason behind downtime, user error is the most common reason why businesses experience downtime. We all make mistakes, which is why it is important to have a disaster recovery plan in place for when the worst occurs.

Migration Issues

Moving data around always creates an opportunity for corruption or data loss. Luckily, this form of downtime is very easy to prevent with a solid data backup in place.

THE TRUE COST OF DOWNTIME.

It’s almost impossible to assess the exact cost of downtime because infrastructures vary so widely. However, Gartner estimates that the average cost of IT downtime is $5,600 per minute. This figure estimate sits anywhere between $140,000 per hour at the low end and as much as $540,000 at the high end. Also, if downtime is related to data vulnerability or theft, this cost can be astronomically more.

According to The20.com, “98% of organizations say a single hour of downtime costs over $100,000. 81% of respondents indicated that 60 minutes of downtime costs their business over $300,000. 33% of those enterprises reported that one hour of downtime costs their firms $1–5 million.”

OFFLINE PREPARATIONS.

Luckily, there are a few easy steps that you can take to prepare for downtime to minimize the impact it has on your daily operations. We’ve gathered some tips to help you below:

Accept downtime as inevitable.

Even the best and the most expensive infrastructures will lapse eventually. Accept that downtime will occur at some point in the future and begin to plan now. Even the bests hosts in the business experience some downtime.

At THG Hosting, our uptime guarantee states that we are not 100%, however, we are pretty close. We average less than 1 minute down for every 10,000 minutes we are online. Our infrastructure is almost infallible and we get closer to perfect uptime every day.

Create a plan.

Your disaster recovery plan will uniquely fit your organization and your mission-critical tasks. It’s worth investing some time and money to ensure that you prevent as much damage as possible. You may ultimately save your business thousands of dollars. Create emergency teams for various tasks in the event of an outage. A little organization can go a long way when downtime actually occurs.

Keep failproof backups

Be sure that your data is safely stored off-premise in the event of a total loss. Be sure to back up your data as often as it is updated to avoid losing important information should the worst occur. THG Hosting partners with R1Soft to provide fail-proof block-level backups to save you both time and resources. Learn more about creating foolproof backups with THG Hosting on our Backup Protection page.