Your server went down at 9:00 AM. When do you start losing money?
Answer: you already are.
Most small business owners underestimate the cost of IT downtime. An hour without email or CRM seems like just an inconvenience. But when you add up all the losses, the numbers are striking.
What is IT downtime and why small businesses suffer most
IT downtime is any period when your systems are unavailable or operating with limitations. Server not responding, internet gone, database corrupted — all of this is downtime.
There are two types of downtime:
Planned downtime — system updates, maintenance. Can be scheduled for nights or weekends.
Unplanned downtime — equipment failures, cyberattacks, human errors, power outages. This is what hits businesses hardest.
Why does small business suffer more than large enterprises? Corporations have backup data centers, 24/7 IT teams on call, insurance policies. Small businesses often don’t even have a current backup.
Downtime statistics: global and Ukrainian
According to Gartner, the average cost of downtime for enterprise companies is $5,600 per minute. For small and medium businesses, ITIC estimates losses at $137-427 per minute.
Sounds like American realities? Let’s recalculate for Ukraine.
According to IT-Premium data (17 years working with Ukrainian businesses, over 100 clients):
- Average number of serious incidents in a company without IT support: 8-12 per year
- Average recovery time without IT support: 4-8 hours
- Average recovery time with professional support: 30-60 minutes
- Most common causes of downtime: equipment failures (35%), human errors (25%), cyberattacks (20%), power outages (15%), software failures (5%)
How to calculate downtime cost for your business
The formula is simple:
Downtime Cost = Lost Revenue + Recovery Costs + Lost Productivity + Reputation Losses
Let’s break it down with an example.
Company: 15 employees, average salary 45,000 UAH, monthly revenue 600,000 UAH.
Lost productivity per hour: 15 employees × (45,000 UAH ÷ 168 working hours) = 4,018 UAH
Lost revenue per hour: 600,000 UAH ÷ 168 working hours = 3,571 UAH
Total direct cost per hour of downtime: 7,600 UAH ($185)
And this doesn’t account for hidden costs.
Hidden costs that get forgotten
Direct costs are just the tip of the iceberg.
Lost deals. A client called, but your CRM is down. You promise to call back. The client doesn’t wait — goes to a competitor.
Overtime work. System recovery on weekends means paying overtime or team burnout.
Penalties and fines. If you have SLAs with clients — downtime can result in direct penalties.
Team stress. After a serious incident, productivity drops 15-20% for several more days. People get nervous, double-check everything.
Reputation damage. One negative Google review isn’t just text. It’s potential clients who won’t come to you.
By our estimates, hidden costs can exceed direct costs by 2-3 times.
Real Ukrainian business cases
Case 1: E-commerce store on Black Friday
What happened: DDoS attack at 10:00 AM on the hottest day of the year. Downtime duration: 6 hours. Direct losses: 180,000 UAH in sales. Indirect losses: customers who went to competitors and never returned. Cause: no DDoS protection because “why pay, nobody attacks us.”
Case 2: Logistics company
What happened: ransomware attack via phishing email. Downtime duration: 2 days. Direct losses: failed deliveries worth 400,000+ UAH. Consequences: loss of two major contracts because clients didn’t forgive the delays. Cause: employee opened an attachment in an email “from the bank.”
Case 3: Accounting firm
What happened: server failure with 1C database. Downtime duration: 4 hours on the last day for filing reports. Direct losses: 8,000 UAH fine to client for late submission. Consequences: lost the client. Cause: old server that “still works.”
How to reduce downtime risk and cost
Completely avoiding downtime is impossible. But you can significantly reduce its frequency and duration.
24/7 Monitoring. Know about problems before your clients do. Modern monitoring systems alert about failures in minutes, not hours.
Backup with verification. Having a backup isn’t enough. You need to regularly verify that you can actually restore from it. We’ve seen cases where companies made backups for years… that turned out to be empty.
Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP). Who does what when everything goes down? If there’s no plan — the team will panic instead of act.
IT outsourcing. An in-house admin is one person who gets sick, goes on vacation, and can quit. Outsourcing is a team with guaranteed response time.
Cyber insurance. A financial cushion for serious incidents.
Comparison: with IT support vs without
| Metric | Without professional support | With IT-Premium |
|---|---|---|
| Problem detection time | 2-4 hours | 5-15 minutes |
| Recovery time | 8-24 hours | 30-60 minutes |
| Incidents per year | 8-12 | 2-4 |
| Average annual downtime losses | 150,000-300,000 UAH | 20,000-50,000 UAH |
Conclusion
Downtime always costs more than it seems. The formula is simple: if the cost of IT support is less than the cost of one serious downtime incident — the support pays for itself.
For a company with 15 employees, one day of downtime can cost 60,000-100,000 UAH. An annual IT maintenance contract starts at 36,000 UAH.
The math is obvious.
Want to know the real cost of downtime for your business?
IT-Premium provides free IT infrastructure audits. We’ll show you the weak points in your system and calculate potential losses.