Question 1

How do you calculate the cost of lost customer trust? That seems impossible to measure.

Accepted Answer

We use customer lifetime value (LTV) and churn data. Research shows: 1 hour of downtime causes 1-3% customer churn for SaaS. For e-commerce, 30% of customers who experience downtime never return. If your average customer is worth €5,000 LTV and you have 1,000 customers, one downtime incident loses 10-30 customers = €50,000-€150,000 in lifetime value. This isn't theoretical—companies track this in their metrics. The first downtime, customers forgive. The second, they start looking for alternatives. The third, they leave and warn others. Trust loss compounds.

Question 2

My site has been down for a few hours before and nothing terrible happened. Are these numbers exaggerated?

Accepted Answer

You probably didn't measure the damage. Lost sales are visible—you see no orders during downtime. What you miss: customers who bounced and never came back (silent churn), negative reviews posted during downtime, damage to SEO rankings (Google demotes unreliable sites), team morale impact from fire-fighting, opportunity cost of emergency fixes. Plus you got lucky—downtime during low-traffic Tuesday afternoon costs less than Black Friday downtime. Most founders dramatically underestimate because they only count direct visible losses, not the compound effects over weeks and months.

Question 3

Is investing in expensive hosting really worth it to prevent downtime?

Accepted Answer

Do the math. If one hour of downtime costs you €10,000 and you experience 4 incidents/year, that's €40,000 annual cost. Premium managed hosting preventing those incidents costs €24,000/year—net savings of €16,000 plus you avoid the stress and reputation damage. For many businesses, reliability pays for itself. But if your downtime costs €100/hour and preventing it costs €2,000/month, then no—cheaper hosting makes sense. Use this calculator to find your specific break-even point. Generally: high-traffic e-commerce and SaaS need premium reliability. Blogs and low-traffic sites can tolerate occasional downtime.

Question 4

What about scheduled maintenance? Should I count that as downtime?

Accepted Answer

Scheduled maintenance is less damaging than unexpected downtime, but it still costs you. Difference: you can warn customers (reduces surprise/anger), do it during low-traffic hours (minimizes impact), prepare (team isn't fire-fighting). But you still lose: revenue during maintenance window, customers who forget to come back, inconvenience. Best practice: aim for zero-downtime deployments using blue-green or rolling updates. If you must have maintenance windows, schedule them for your lowest-traffic time and keep them under 30 minutes. Track both scheduled and unscheduled downtime—many providers hide behind 'scheduled maintenance' to exclude incidents from SLA.

Question 5

How often should I expect downtime with different hosting tiers?

Accepted Answer

Industry averages: Shared hosting (€5-20/month): 4-8 incidents/year, 1-4 hours downtime each. Basic VPS (€20-50/month): 2-6 incidents/year, 30 minutes-2 hours each. Managed hosting (€100-500/month): 1-3 incidents/year, 10-60 minutes each. Premium/enterprise (€500-2,000/month): 0-2 incidents/year, 5-30 minutes each. Note: these are averages—some providers are significantly better or worse. Check their public status page history. Multiple short incidents are often worse than one long incident because each one trains customers that your site is unreliable. Use this calculator to determine how many incidents per year you can afford before upgraded hosting pays for itself.

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