How much does IT downtime cost your business?
Calculate the real cost of one hour of server downtime for your company and discover how to protect your business.
Your IT downtime financial risk
Cost per hour
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Cost per incident
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Total annual risk
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Calculation breakdown
Comparison with RDEM Systems managed services
Your annual risk
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Annual managed services cost
From EUR 840 (EUR 70/month, 7am-10pm 7 days a week)
With a guaranteed 1-hour response time, you drastically reduce your downtime and protect - of potential risk.
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How to calculate the cost of IT downtime?
The cost of IT downtime is often underestimated by businesses. It is not limited to the direct loss of revenue: it also includes the unproductivity of blocked employees, indirect costs related to reputation and stress, and sometimes contractual penalties towards your own clients.
Our downtime cost calculator uses a 3-step method to estimate your real financial risk:
- Hourly revenue loss: your annual revenue divided by 1,820 working hours, weighted by your IT dependency rate.
- Unproductivity cost: the fully loaded salary cost of your employees idle during the outage.
- Indirect costs: estimated at 20% of direct costs (reputation impact, loss of client trust, organisational stress).
The most widely repeated figure on this subject comes from a post by analyst Andrew Lerner on the Gartner Blog Network, dated 16 July 2014: $5,600 per minute, extrapolating to well over $300,000 per hour. Two caveats come with it, and they matter: Gartner states that posts on that blog do not go through its standard editorial review and do not represent the views of the firm, and the author himself stresses that this is an average with a large degree of variance across sectors. For an SMB, the order of magnitude is entirely different: between EUR 500 and EUR 5,000/hour depending on the business (roughly $550 to $5,500 USD).
Our estimate, and why we revised it — 27 August 2026
Until that date we displayed $5,600/hour in this page's description as shown in search results, from 7 March to 27 August 2026. That number is indeed Lerner's, but in his post it means $5,600 per minute — “Based on industry surveys, the number we typically cite is $5,600 p/minute, which extrapolates to well over $300K p/hour” — not $5,600 per hour. We had transposed it by changing the unit.
Our French-language pages carried the same error in euros: €5,600/hour, in the French calculator's search-results description from 20 February 2026, and in a French article from 23 March 2026 — both until 27 August 2026. That is the figure quoted by the French-language articles that cite us.
We now use EUR 500 to 5,000/hour depending on the business. This range is established from our own interventions, not taken from a study: beyond the direct loss of operating revenue, it covers the sales never made during the outage.
Articles published before 27 August 2026 that cite us for $5,600/hour, or €5,600/hour from our French pages, therefore refer to the figure we displayed at the time, and not to an error on their part.
The best protection against these costs is prevention: proactive 24/7 monitoring combined with a guaranteed response time allows you to detect and resolve incidents before they impact your business.
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Intervention within 1 hour, 24/7, on the Critical plan (within 4 hours on Pro). Reduce your server downtime.
From EUR 70/month
Monitoring, maintenance, on-call support. Fixed price, predictable budget. EUR 70 (7am-10pm, 7 days a week) or EUR 150 (24x7).
Related reads: cut the cost of an outage
Outsource 24/7 on-call
How to fund 24/7 coverage when downtime cost outpaces in-house budgets.
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Numbers-based comparison: who actually responds when a critical incident hits.
Proxmox DRP: multi-site architecture
Concrete RTO/RPO targets to cap the duration of a major outage.
Immutable backup vs ransomware
Costing the worst case: data loss vs the price of prevention.
Is your business protected?
The cost of an IT outage often exceeds estimates. Get a free assessment of your infrastructure and identify your weak points before they cost you dearly.
Frequently asked questions
How much does one hour of IT downtime cost?
The cost of one hour of IT downtime depends on your annual revenue, headcount and IT dependency. For an SMB with EUR 2M in revenue, 25 employees and 70% IT dependency, the hourly cost ranges between EUR 1,000 and EUR 3,000 including lost revenue, employee unproductivity and indirect costs.
How do you calculate IT downtime cost?
The cost of downtime is calculated by adding three components: hourly revenue loss (annual revenue / 1,820 working hours x IT dependency %), employee unproductivity cost, and indirect costs (reputation, stress, estimated at 20% of direct costs). Then multiply by the outage duration and annual frequency.
How can you reduce the cost of IT outages?
Managed services with a contractual response time (GTI) drastically reduce the duration of outages. With a 1-hour response time and proactive 24/7 monitoring, most incidents are detected and resolved before they impact your business. At RDEM Systems, managed services start from EUR 70/month per server.