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High Availability for Databases: Pros, Cons, and Hidden Costs

High Availability for Databases: Pros, Cons, and Hidden Costs

Is it right for your business?

Kevin Hill
January 31, 2025

High Availability is a must for critical databases

Every company says they want "zero downtime," but the reality is more nuanced. Before investing in an HA solution, it’s important to weigh the benefits against the costs (both direct and hidden).

Pros:

Minimized Downtime - The biggest advantage of HA is ensuring your database stays online, even during system failures. Clusters, Availability Groups, and 3^rd party failover solutions keep databases online.

Customer & Employee Experience - Downtime frustrates users and damages trust. HA keeps applications responsive and reliable, leading to happier customers and a smoother internal workflow.

Regulatory Compliance - Industries like finance and healthcare often require high availability to meet compliance and data integrity standards.

Offload Processing - in some cases, an HA solution can be used to offload reporting / read-only processes to a secondary node.

Cons:

Cost - HA solutions require additional licensing (Enterprise Edition for SQL Server in the case of an AG), extra hardware, and ongoing maintenance.

Increased Complexity - Implementing HA means more moving parts: clusters, replicas, failover mechanisms, and monitoring. If you don’t have a DBA on staff, managing this can be a challenge.

False Sense of Security - HA doesn’t always equal disaster recovery. A misconfigured system, a ransomware attack, or human error can still bring everything down. Most HA solutions are in the same physical location or cloud region.

The Real Cost of an Outage:

If you think HA is expensive, consider the alternative. Here’s what an outage can cost:

Lost Revenue - E-commerce sites can lose thousands of dollars per minute of downtime.
Brand Reputation Damage - Customers remember outages and may not return.
Productivity Loss - Employees sitting idle while IT scrambles to fix things is money wasted, and morale killing
Compliance Fines & Legal Risk - Downtime in regulated industries can mean hefty penalties.

The Bottom Line

High Availability isn’t for every business, but if downtime would cripple your operations, the investment is often worth it. If you're unsure whether HA fits your needs, let’s talk.