Lost Business During Outages?

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No idea about the actual topic, but where in Cheshire are you? I'm near Alderley Edge.

Typically, the update time does not hurt my sales too badly. I often do see a buying spurt later in the evening on update days once people get back in that makes up for the lost time. generally at least it is an average day for me. But then for my businesses anyway, the primary sales period seems to be in the late evenings and overnight...so update times don't interrupt those times anyway.

Usually during periods of extended outage (grid attacks, unforseen patch failures, massive patch introduced bugs) I tend to see a marginal downswing in business for the next several days due to less people bothering to log in I suppose.

Especially when there are large game affecting bugs such as the LOD bug back in 1.10.3...my business more or less came to a stand still there because everything I make was affected by it. And I had to wait out an entire week for that to get sorted out.

But yes, every time theres some kind of outage or unplanned maintenance period....business suffers for a day to two days afterwards for me.

Yeah, it's noticeable.

The dataserver crash of a couple days ago did some serious rollback damage to my last sim's development, and pushed back its opening fully to... today. Today, with all of the update issues.



Noticeable economic impact? I'll spare everyone the math I use, but when you have over a sim-full of people moving in, compensating for lost time, &c... monetarily I'm losing on the order of $L 7000 this round.

Which is nothing compared to the work lost on the new sim in the dataserver rollback, that had to be redone.



Does it bother me? Nah. This won't even scratch me. I hold financial reserves for incidents far, far bigger this.

If you can't weather this kinda thing, you aren't ready to do biz in SL.

Heck, you aren't even ready to do business in RL even. You wanna start a business, get ready to lose a ton of money before you even start getting a profit.

I've lost about $100 USD because of the downtime. Woohoo!

it is noticeable but not a big deal. just part of doing business in SL. I surely will survive the loss of few thousand Lindens.

whats more important is I spent all day at my RL job to come home and not be able to get in world. now that hurts!!

Interesting answers! Always wondered how business owners felt...and yet despite having more reason to moan than most...you all seem fairly laid back about it.

And Rusholme, nice to finally meet somebody else from Cheshire on SL. I'm more central...and rural than yourself. I live in Great Budworth.

We 'lose sales' (prima facie) every time the grid goes down, but these outages (actually scheduled maintenance) are part of the 'cost of doing business'.

Wednesdays 'cost' us on average about US$45-$50 in lost sales, but who knows how many of those are recouped later. Probably most of them. We'll live.

We never got a guarantee of 100% uptime. Downtime is something that business owners have to live with, whether its a server patch in SL, or a blizzard in RL.

It really is just part of the landscape.

I suppose patterns remain the same, not so much of a surge as people simply coming back at a later time.

The complaints are a bit nonsensical, as if someone wants to buy something of yours, they aren't going to decide not to because of a grid outage.

They'll simply come back later if they still want it.

So overall, the 'percieved' losses due to outage are probably much, much lesser than simple 'purchase rate calculations'.

Often, people are just looking for someone to scream at.