What downtime actually costs
Resilience is an investment, and like any investment it should be sized to what it prevents. Before you spend on redundancy, it helps to put an honest number on what an hour of downtime really costs you.
“We need high availability” is a conclusion, not a starting point. The starting point is a number: what does an hour down actually cost? Without it, you either under-invest and get hurt, or over-invest in redundancy you will never recoup.
The parts of the cost
- Direct — revenue not earned while you are down; staff paid to fix it.
- Indirect — work backed up, SLA credits owed, customers who try again later or do not.
- Reputational — trust lost, which is slow to rebuild and hard to price but real.
A rough figure beats none
You do not need a precise model. Revenue per hour, times the fraction you lose when down, plus the people pulled off other work, gets you an order of magnitude. That number is enough to decide whether an outage costs you tens, thousands or tens of thousands an hour — which is the decision that matters.
Spend to match, not to impress
If an hour down costs little and is rare, a good backup and a quick restore is the right level — see backups and rescue mode. If it costs a fortune per hour, redundancy and failover start to pay for themselves — see high availability, honestly. Let the cost choose the tier.
RTO and RPO fall out of it
Two targets follow directly: how fast you must be back (recovery time) and how much data you can afford to lose (recovery point). A high downtime cost justifies tight targets and the architecture to hit them; a low one does not. See capacity planning.
Tell us what you are protecting
When you know the cost, the conversation with us gets concrete — a warm spare, a second server, a tighter SLA. We would rather build the right amount of resilience than sell you more than the risk warrants. See questions worth asking any provider.
Still stuck? Mail support@novogara.com — an engineer answers, at any hour. Back to the knowledge base