What does an hour of downtime cost you?
Six questions about your business and your last bad outage. See what an hour offline costs, what one outage costs, and what getting back faster would be worth each year.
How the number is worked out
Revenue per working hour is your annual revenue divided by the hours you run in a year (hours a week × 52).
Revenue lost per hour down is that figure, times the share that stops (question 2), then reduced by the part you make up later (question 3).
Idle labor per hour down is the people who can't work, times their loaded hourly cost.
The cost of an hour down is the two added together. One outage costs that, times the working hours it lasts. A year costs one outage, times how often it happens.
What faster recovery is worth is the yearly cost at today's recovery time, minus the yearly cost at the time you'd aim for.
It leaves out overtime premiums, scrapped or late work, contract penalties, customers who don't come back, and data you can't get back. Treat the answer as a floor, not a forecast. The bands in the result (under $25,000 a year, up to $250,000, and above) are our rule of thumb, not an industry standard.
Recovery time, in plain words
The target in question 6 is what IT people call a recovery time objective. NIST, the U.S. standards body, defines it as the time a system can spend in recovery "before negatively impacting the organization's mission or mission/business processes." In other words: how long you can afford to be down, decided before it happens.
Sources (checked 30 October 2026)
- NIST Computer Security Resource Center glossary, "recovery time objective" (from NIST SP 800-34 Rev. 1)
- Liberty Center One, "Disaster Recovery Services" (5-minute failover promise, Liberty DR included for cloud hosting customers, free 30-day trial, backup versus disaster recovery)
- Liberty Center One, "About Us" (Liberty DR introduced in 2025 with 5-minute failover and one-click self-service)
- The arithmetic is Salter Growth's own. Nothing you type is sent anywhere.
When faster recovery pays
Backups bring back data. Disaster recovery brings back the running systems. Liberty Center One, our data center partner in Royal Oak, Michigan, puts it plainly: "a backup of your data will not recreate mission-critical systems." Its disaster recovery service carries a 5-minute failover promise once you start the failover, it's included for customers who host their systems in Liberty's cloud, and there's a free 30-day trial. In one case Liberty Center One publishes, Microsoft and Amazon quoted an organization more than $1 million a year for disaster recovery, and Liberty's alternative came in at about 75% less.
Liberty Center One pays Salter Growth when an engagement goes ahead; you pay us nothing. If your number says backups are enough, we'll tell you that too.
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