How Much Is the Namecheap Outage Costing Website Owners?

Published on August 13, 2026 | Written by Alec Pow
This article was researched using 14 sources. See our methodology and corrections policy.

Every additional hour of the Namecheap outage could put another $1.34 million in normal ecommerce sales inside the disruption window if just 10% of the online-store activity using Namecheap DNS is unable to transact. Even at a much smaller 1% affected share, the figure is about $134,000 per hour. At 5%, it is roughly $671,000 per hour. These are not guesses at Namecheap’s total bill: they come from the detected ecommerce footprint behind its infrastructure and deliberately conservative sales assumptions.

ThePricer analyzed independent data from IPinfo, BuiltWith, W3Techs, and TechnologyChecker after Namecheap reported that the August 13, 2026 incident was affecting hosting, EasyWP, DNS, email, redirects, and other services. IPinfo detects about 7.69 million domains on Namecheap’s hosting network, while BuiltWith detects about 6.78 million live Namecheap-hosted websites. More importantly for the money question, BuiltWith identifies nearly 96,000 ecommerce sites with estimated sales on Namecheap Hosting and more than 365,000 ecommerce sites using Namecheap DNS.

We then priced the commercial activity behind those stores without assuming they all went offline. Using only the lowest sales figure in every BuiltWith revenue range, the Namecheap-hosted ecommerce population represents at least $1.55 billion in estimated monthly sales, or about $2.12 million during an average hour. The larger ecommerce population using Namecheap DNS represents at least $9.8 billion per month, or roughly $13.42 million per average hour. That is why even a small affected percentage produces a large number.

The actual loss will be lower than the total sales passing through the outage window. Some Namecheap-dependent sites remained reachable, DNS caching can delay the impact, and some shoppers who encounter an unavailable store will return later. But others will not. On top of missed transactions, businesses can also be paying employees to troubleshoot the outage, continuing to spend money on ads, missing email leads, and eventually receiving an uptime remedy worth only a fraction of the business activity at stake.

Article Highlights

• A store making $100,000 (at $30 per hour, earning that amount would take about 1.6 years of full-time work, before taxes) per month normally generates about $821 during six hours. At $1 million per month, the same six hours represent about $8,214 in sales.
• Independent network data identifies about 7.69 million domains hosted on Namecheap’s AS22612 network, while BuiltWith detects about 6.78 million live sites using Namecheap Hosting.
• BuiltWith identifies nearly 96,000 ecommerce sites with estimated sales on Namecheap Hosting.
• Using only the lowest value in each BuiltWith sales range, those stores represent at least $1.55 billion in estimated monthly ecommerce sales, or about $2.12 million during an average hour.
• The larger population of ecommerce sites using Namecheap DNS represents at least $13.42 million in estimated sales during an average hour under the same conservative calculation.
• If just 10% of that DNS-dependent ecommerce activity could not transact for six hours, about $8.05 million in normal sales activity would fall inside the outage window. That is not the same as $8.05 million permanently lost.
• Namecheap’s hosting uptime guarantee generally gives eligible customers one extra service day for each qualifying hour of downtime, rather than reimbursing lost sales.

What Could One Website Lose?

For a website owner, the simplest calculation is also the most useful one. Take the amount your site normally sells in a month, divide it by the 730.5 hours in an average month, and multiply the result by the number of hours your site could not take orders.

Monthly online sales ÷ 730.5 × hours unavailable

Monthly online sales	Average sales per hour	Sales during 6 hours
$10,000 (about 8.3 full-time workweeks at $30 per hour)	$13.69	$82
$25,000	$34.22	$205
$50,000	$68.45	$411
$100,000	$136.89	$821
$500,000	$684.46	$4,107
$1 million	$1,368.93	$8,214
$10 million	$13,689	$82,136

This does not mean every dollar in the last column disappears. A shopper who could not buy at noon might return at 6 p.m. Others will not. If a $100,000-a-month store had $821 of normal sales fall inside the outage but eventually recovered 80% of them, the unrecovered amount would be about $164. If only half of the purchases returned, about $411 would remain missing.

For a $1 million-a-month store, recovering half of the normal six-hour sales would still leave roughly $4,107 unrecovered.

How Big Is Namecheap’s Web Footprint?

Namecheap manages far more domains than it directly hosts, so its often-quoted total domain count should not be used as the number of websites affected by the outage.

A better check comes from independent infrastructure datasets. Network-level data for Namecheap’s AS22612 identifies about 7.69 million hosted domains. Separately, technology-detection data for Namecheap Hosting identifies about 6.78 million live websites.

Those two measurements use different methods but land in roughly the same range. That gives us considerably more confidence that Namecheap’s hosting footprint really does run into the millions.

The commercial part of that footprint matters most for this story. BuiltWith detects 95,972 Namecheap-hosted ecommerce sites with estimated monthly sales of at least $100. Within that group, it identifies 19,738 sites estimated above $10,000 per month, 1,974 above $100,000, 381 above $1 million, and 69 above $10 million.

Those are estimates rather than financial reports from the merchants. BuiltWith says its ecommerce sales estimates use signals such as traffic, website age, location, and technology use.

At Least $2.1 Million an Hour in Store Sales

Rather than guessing what the “average” Namecheap store earns, ThePricer used the lowest possible number in every BuiltWith sales range.

A store estimated at $100,000 to $999,999 per month was counted as making exactly $100,000. A store in the $1 million to $9.99 million range was counted at $1 million. Even a business estimated above $10 million was counted at only $10 million.

Using those deliberately low numbers, the 95,972 ecommerce sites detected on Namecheap Hosting represent at least $1.545 billion in estimated monthly sales.

That works out to about:

• $50.8 million per average day
• $2.12 million per average hour
• $35,261 per average minute

What does that $2.12 million figure actually mean? It means that, across the detected Namecheap-hosted store population, at least that much estimated ecommerce business normally occurs during an average hour.

It does not mean the outage destroyed $2.12 million every hour. We do not know what percentage of those stores became unreachable, when each one failed, or how many postponed purchases were completed later.

The DNS Problem Reached Further

Hosting was only part of the August 13 incident. In its August 13 emergency notice, Namecheap said its DNS infrastructure was also unavailable.

That matters because a website does not have to be hosted by Namecheap to depend on Namecheap for DNS. Independent DNS market-share data puts Namecheap’s DNS footprint at roughly three times its web-hosting share.

A separate BuiltWith dataset for Namecheap DNS identifies 365,443 ecommerce sites with estimated monthly sales of at least $100. That includes 9,026 estimated above $100,000 per month, 1,576 above $1 million, 299 above $10 million, and 33 above $100 million.

Using the same lowest-number-in-each-range method, those stores represent at least $9.8 billion per month in estimated ecommerce sales, equal to about $13.42 million during an average hour.

Again, $13.42 million is not an hourly outage-loss claim. It tells us how much ecommerce activity sits behind the detected Namecheap DNS population.

Share unable to transact	Normal sales during 1 hour	Normal sales during 6 hours
1%	$134,000	$805,000
5%	$671,000	$4.03 million
10%	$1.34 million	$8.05 million
25%	$3.36 million	$20.13 million

The most useful way to read this table is the 1% scenario. Even if only one out of every 100 dollars of ecommerce represented by the dataset were unable to transact for six hours, more than $800,000 in normal sales activity would sit inside that window.

7 Million Sites Did Not All Vanish at Once

DNS caching is one reason headlines claiming that every Namecheap-dependent website instantly went offline would be misleading.

Namecheap’s documentation says the default TTL for ordinary host records is 30 minutes, while ALIAS records default to five minutes. TTL controls how long another DNS resolver can keep an answer it has already received.

So when authoritative DNS has a problem, someone whose resolver still has a valid cached answer may continue reaching a website for a while. Another visitor whose resolver needs a fresh answer may fail sooner.

In other words, Namecheap DNS becoming unavailable would not make every dependent website disappear at the same second. The financial impact spreads unevenly as caches expire and services recover.

Employee Time

A store can lose money without missing a single order. Somebody still has to figure out what is happening.

Company data for Namecheap Hosting users includes more than 60,000 businesses with detailed profiles. Of those with employee counts, 60.8% have only 1 to 10 workers and more than 81% have fewer than 50.

For a small company, the person checking DNS records, opening support tickets, pausing ads, answering customer complaints, calling a developer, and testing the site again may be the owner or one of only a handful of employees.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ private-sector employer cost averages about $46.60 per employee-hour when wages and benefits are combined.

That means one employee spending six hours on an outage represents about $280 in employer time.

Now scale that very cautiously. If just 1% of TechnologyChecker’s roughly 60,000 enriched Namecheap-hosting businesses had one employee spend six hours responding to the outage, the combined employer time would be worth roughly $169,000.

At 5%, it approaches $845,000.

Those figures contain no lost sales at all.

Ads Can Keep Buying Dead Clicks

Paid advertising creates another straightforward cost. If a store’s website becomes unavailable but its campaigns keep running, customers can still click ads that lead to an error page or failed checkout.

Normal daily ad budget	Budget running during 6 hours
$100	$25
$500	$125
$1,000	$250
$5,000	$1,250
$10,000	$2,500

Not every dollar in that window is automatically wasted. Campaigns may be paused, traffic does not arrive evenly throughout the day, and some visitors may come back. But a company spending $1,000 a day has about $250 scheduled to run during six hours. If the store is unreachable, that becomes another number the owner has to investigate.

Email Can Cost Sales Too

Namecheap also warned that Private Email and hosted mailboxes could experience delayed incoming and outgoing messages.

The company said earlier this year that its Private Email service supports more than 470,000 customers and 1.4 million mailboxes.

For an individual business, the useful calculation is not how many emails Namecheap processes. It is how much a missed or delayed lead is worth.

Expected leads during the outage × close rate × average sale value

A business normally receiving 20 qualified leads per day, closing 10% of them at an average initial sale of $500, has about $250 in expected new-business value passing through a six-hour period.

The email may eventually arrive. The customer may also move on to a competitor before it does.

Then There Is the Hosting Credit

This is where the financial contrast becomes striking.

Namecheap’s published hosting uptime guarantee generally provides one additional service day for each qualifying hour of unscheduled downtime.

That is a service remedy. It is not insurance against everything a business might lose while its website is unavailable.

Example during a 6-hour outage	Amount
Normal sales for a $100,000/month store	$821
One employee for 6 hours at $46.60/hour	$280
$1,000/day ad budget running for 6 hours	$250
Approx. value of 6 extra days on a $10/month service	$1.97

These figures should not be treated as four equivalent claims against Namecheap. They illustrate something different: the value of keeping a business online can be hundreds or thousands of times greater than the price of the hosting account itself.

For a $10-per-month service, six extra days have a prorated value of about $1.97. For a $50-per-month service, six days are worth about $9.86. At $100 per month, they are worth about $19.71.

Namecheap’s published general terms also contain limitations involving lost profits and consequential or economic damages. Customers considering a claim should check the terms for their specific service and keep outage timestamps, analytics, orders, ad reports, support messages, and other records. This is financial analysis, not legal advice.

What Actually Failed in Phoenix?

The chain of events was remarkably physical. Overnight utility disturbances in Phoenix were followed by rising temperatures inside the data center, cooling problems, temporary floor cooling, work on chillers, and plans for temporary backup equipment. Hours later, website owners were calculating what their unavailable stores were costing them.

The PhoenixNAP incident timeline first recorded elevated ambient temperatures at 3:28 a.m. MST. PhoenixNAP later said multiple utility “bump” events during overnight storms contributed to the temperature problem.

Namecheap reported later that two of four chillers were running again and, by its 2:30 p.m. EDT update, said falling temperatures were allowing teams to prepare network equipment and customer services for staged restoration.

This is why the price of cooling a modern data center matters even to a small business owner who has never seen the building where a website is hosted. Servers turn electricity into heat. When cooling and power redundancy fail, the cost can show up thousands of miles away as abandoned carts, missed leads, and employee hours.

It also connects with the broader issue we examined in our article on how data centers can affect grid and blackout costs. The physical infrastructure behind online services remains dependent on electricity, cooling, networking, and backup systems no matter how invisible the “cloud” feels to the customer.

When Does Backup Become Worth Paying For?

The relevant number for a website owner is the cost of one hour offline.

A $10,000-per-month store has about $14 in average hourly sales. Spending hundreds every month on elaborate multi-region failover may make little economic sense.

A $1 million-per-month store has about $1,369 in sales passing through an average hour. At that level, paying for independent DNS, monitoring, a CDN, tested offsite backups, standby hosting, and geographic redundancy becomes much easier to justify.

Redundancy itself is not free. Separate networks, backup infrastructure, and even physical connectivity can add substantial costs, as our guide to fiber optic installation costs illustrates. The goal is not to buy every possible backup. It is to spend less preventing an outage than the outage is likely to cost.

How Large Can Outage Costs Get?

Six-figure outage bills are not unusual among larger organizations. The Uptime Institute’s 2026 outage analysis found that 57% of respondents said their most recent major outage cost more than $100,000, while one in five put their most recent impactful outage above $1 million.

Those figures do not tell us what the August 13 Namecheap outage cost. No public dataset can currently tell us exactly how many websites were unavailable minute by minute, how many checkouts failed, or how many shoppers returned later.

But we do know that millions of websites sit on Namecheap infrastructure, tens of thousands of detectable ecommerce businesses use its hosting, and an even larger commercial population depends on its DNS. That means even a relatively small affected percentage can put millions of dollars of normal business activity inside the outage window.

Answers to Common Questions

How much did the Namecheap outage cost website owners?

There is no verified total. ThePricer’s calculations show that the ecommerce sites detected on Namecheap Hosting normally account for at least about $2.12 million in estimated sales per average hour when the lowest value in every BuiltWith sales range is used. The broader Namecheap DNS ecommerce population represents about $13.42 million per hour under the same method. Only a portion of that activity would have been affected.

How much could the outage cost my website?

Divide your normal monthly online revenue by 730.5 and multiply by the hours your website could not transact. A $100,000-per-month store has about $137 in average hourly sales, while a $1 million-per-month store has about $1,369.

Were more than 7 million websites offline?

No evidence supports that claim. Independent datasets identify roughly 6.8 million to 7.7 million sites or domains on Namecheap hosting infrastructure, but that is the size of the footprint, not the number confirmed offline. Different services, servers, DNS caches, and recovery times meant customers could experience the incident differently.

Why did Namecheap go down?

Namecheap linked the broad August 13 disruption to cooling problems at its Phoenix data center location. PhoenixNAP reported rising temperatures after repeated utility disturbances during overnight storms and brought additional cooling and backup equipment into the response.

Can Namecheap customers claim compensation?

Namecheap’s hosting uptime guarantee generally provides additional service days for qualifying unscheduled downtime. Whether a particular customer or period of downtime qualifies depends on the applicable service and terms. That remedy should not be confused with reimbursement for lost business revenue.

How should I document my outage losses?

Keep screenshots and timestamps showing when the site failed and recovered, analytics showing lost traffic, order and revenue comparisons, ad-platform spending, employee or contractor time, customer complaints, missed leads, and support correspondence. Those records also make it easier to determine later how much revenue was truly lost rather than simply delayed.

Methodology: ThePricer used public infrastructure and technology-detection data from IPinfo, BuiltWith, W3Techs, and TechnologyChecker alongside Namecheap and PhoenixNAP incident information and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics compensation data. BuiltWith’s ecommerce figures are estimates rather than merchant-reported sales. For the aggregate calculations, ThePricer assigned every site only the lowest sales figure required to enter its published revenue range. Scenario percentages illustrate possible exposure and are not estimates of the percentage of Namecheap customers that actually went offline.