Lost sales are the cost everyone counts first. The costs below are the ones that usually go uncounted. For survey figures on what outages cost, see The Cost of Website Downtime: What the Research Shows. To estimate your own number, use the downtime cost calculator.

Search Visibility

Google's documentation says that 5xx and 429 server errors make its crawlers slow down, that URLs already in the index are kept but eventually dropped if the server errors persist, and that once your server responds normally again, Google gradually increases the crawl rate (Google Search Central, HTTP status codes and network errors). So Google may be slower to pick up changes on your site for a while after an outage ends. The documentation gives no number of days, which is a reason to keep outages short and not to guess how long you can get away with.

Support Load

Outages generate tickets, chat messages and social posts from customers who cannot tell whether the problem is theirs or yours. Your support team spends the outage writing near-identical replies, and engineers get pulled away to explain what is happening. A public status page answers the question once. Site Qwality includes one status page on the free plan, on a Site Qwality subdomain.

Customer Churn

A customer who pays monthly can leave monthly. An outage at the moment they needed you, such as a deadline, a sale or their first session with your product, is the kind of failure that sends people looking at alternatives. What you lose is that customer's remaining lifetime revenue, not the minutes of the outage, and unless you ask, you may never learn that the outage was the reason.

SLA Credits and Contract Penalties

If you promise uptime to customers, downtime has a price written down. A 99.9% monthly commitment allows about 43 minutes of downtime in a 30-day month (0.1% of 43,200 minutes), and time beyond that can trigger service credits or other remedies, depending on your contract. Independent monitoring gives you your own record of uptime, which is how you check that you met a commitment before a customer tells you that you did not. The SLA calculator turns a percentage into minutes.

Shortening the Outage

Every cost above grows with the length of an outage, and detection time is the part you control most directly. Site Qwality's HTTP checks run every 5 minutes on the free plan and as often as every 30 seconds on paid uptime plans, with alerts by email, SMS, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Telegram or webhook. Start free, no credit card required.