The Unexpected Economics of Planned Website Downtime
2025-04-10
This article challenges the conventional wisdom of 24/7 website uptime. Using B&H Photo's Saturday closures as a case study, it argues that not all e-commerce sites need to be constantly available. The author explores the high cost of continuous uptime and suggests that planned downtime doesn't necessarily lead to significant customer loss. The article draws parallels with Google's SRE team intentionally introducing minor outages to force users to consider fallback plans. Finally, it calculates the potential cloud cost savings from scheduled downtime and weighs the trade-offs against employee on-call compensation.
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