What Is Your Website Downtime Costing Your Business?

Your website is an extremely powerful lead generation and sales tool. For many businesses, their website is their #1 source of new business. So when your website goes down, do you ever stop to think about how much money every minute of website downtime costs you?

One of our HVAC client’s websites generates $120,000 in revenue each month that can be attributed to their website. The client’s website, as well as their intranet, is hosted on a shared server. With thousands of pages on the website, in addition to the company’s intranet, there is nearly not enough bandwidth on the shared server to a decent uptime percentage and page load speed.

Because we knew how much revenue the client’s website generated each month, we were able to calculate exactly how much revenue the client was losing during server downtime:

• $2.78 every minute
• $166 every hour
• $4,000 every day

When you calculate the costs of server downtime this way, it’s easy to see that for this particular company, the cost of upgrading to Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting was trivial compared to what they were losing in revenue with their shared hosting.

Want to know how much your shared website hosting is costing your business every hour or every minute your server goes down? Just plug in how much revenue your website generates your company each month. If you don’t know this number, step up your tracking game.

What would happen if your site went down for an hour… or a whole day?

VPS Hosting vs Shared Hosting

This infographic from WebHosting Secret Revealed does a good job of explaining the different website hosting options:

Infographic created by Jerry Low of Web Hosting Secret Revealed.

With shared hosting, your website shares a multitude of resources with several other sites on the server. Like we mentioned above, one of the biggest problems with shared hosting is server downtime. A busy server can also slow down your page load speed. Slow page load times not only frustrate your website’s visitors, but they also can hurt your SEO.

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server.  On a VPS your site is allotted dedicated resources to facilitate the increased traffic associated with proper website marketing. You won’t have to worry about other websites slowing you down, and should your server go down, YOU have the ability to reboot it (which is not the case with shared hosting).

The Price of VPS Hosting vs Shared Hosting

VPS hosting is more expensive than shared hosting, but the actual price will depend on your website hosting company and your speed, storage, RAM, bandwidth, and other needs.

For example, Bluehost offers shared hosting between $5.99-$14.95 a month, while their VPS hosting options range from $29.99-$119.99 a month.

Turn Your Website Into a Lead Generation Machine!

From helping you choose the best website hosting to website design, tracking setup, SEO, and more, Blue Corona can help you with all aspects of turning your website into your #1 source of new business. Get started with a free SEO analysis today!