A tweet by @POOLplaza prompted a little investigation on my part and gave some insight into the cost of downtime…not for POOLplaza, but for CybrHost. It seems that POOLplaza, which sells a variety of swimming pool products and accessories and only sells online or over the phone, had service issues with CybrHost, their hosting provider, on May 24th, June 2, and most recently on September 26th this year.
If you’ve got an on-line business and your hosting provider goes down, your going to miss some orders. You can hope that some of the customers you missed will check back and you’ll still get the orders, just later than you’d hoped. Or maybe they will have your phone number and call you, even though they originally planned to purchase on line. But it won’t be 100%. The calculus on the cost of downtime for POOLplaza is complex. But it’s not for CybrHost.
CybrHost offers a service level agreement (SLA) that includes a 100% Server Uptime Guarantee and a 100% Network Uptime Guarantee. There are the usual exclusions for customers’ self-inflicted injuries, but excluding those, the cost of 5 hours of downtime for CybrHost is 50% of revenue from affected customers. That’s because their SLA provides a 5% refund on the monthly charge for each 30 minutes of downtime. Customers do have to ask for the credit, and almost assuredly less than 100% of customers will request the refund, but I’ll bet that POOLplaza does. CybrHost caps the refund at 50% of the monthly fee, but I’m just going to guess, that if a company routinely experiences more than 10 hours of downtime per month from their hosting provider, the revenue will go to zero anyway, because the customer will move to another provider.
