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DRP and BCP
How much does a BCP cost?
A BCP mainly costs a permanent subscription: the standby servers run before the outage, so you pay for them in quiet months as well as in months with an incident. It is more expensive than a DRP at rest, and that is precisely what allows a takeover without waiting for a restoration.
Key points
- The main line is the standby instance running continuously, whose price follows the size of the server it replaces.
- Added to this are storage, one agent per server, and often a sufficient Internet connection on site.
- Not included in the advertised price: standby licences, failover and failback tests, staff time.
- A BCP is judged against the cost of an hour of downtime, not on a feeling that the amount is ‘small’ or ‘expensive’.
The cost lines
- Standby instances, running continuously. A bigger server costs more: the floor price of an instance is not that of a large ERP.
- The storage feeding these instances. A small service can start low on storage and cost mainly through the instance.
- One agent per server on the customer’s site, which monitors and redirects traffic.
- The link between the site and the standby. Any extra cost for Internet bandwidth on the customer’s side is not included in the BCP price: if users go through a connection that is too weak, the standby cannot be used.
- Support and testing. Checking failover and failback takes staff time. This is not included in the instance price.
Compare with the cost of downtime
NIST, the US standards body, recommends finding the balance between the cost of unavailability and the cost of recovery resources. The faster you want to restart, the more the standby costs; a ‘hot’ standby site, ready immediately, is the most expensive solution. The SGDSN, the French government’s general secretariat for defence and national security, also asks organisations to compare the cost of maintaining critical resources with the cost of business disruption before setting the continuity strategy.
A simple calculation is enough to start. If three people with a loaded cost of €40 an hour are unable to work, a five-hour outage already costs €600 in salaries, before any lost revenue. That is how a BCP should be judged, not on a feeling that ‘€65 is not much’ or ‘it is expensive’.
Why it costs more than a backup
A backup keeps no server running. A BCP keeps compute, memory and monitoring running. You are paying for availability, not just gigabytes.
A DRP may look cheaper month after month because activation is billed per day. Over a year without a disaster, the preparation cost of a DRP is often lower than that of an equivalent BCP. Over a year with an outage lasting several days, you have to add up the days. A BCP does not present that surprise bill: it is already in the subscription. See How much does a DRP cost?.
What is not in the advertised price
- Oversizing ‘just in case’.
- Software licences for the standby, sometimes payable twice.
- The time spent writing and testing the procedure for returning to the original server.
- An immutable anti-ransomware copy, which remains a separate backup line: see What is an immutable backup?.
At WeDoBack
Public prices excluding VAT as of October 2026, to show the structure; the actual size of the instances is priced with you.
- BCP instances: from €50.22 excl. VAT per month per instance, running permanently.
- BCP storage: from €8.75 excl. VAT per month for 50 GB, i.e. €175 excl. VAT per TB.
- Agent: €6 excl. VAT per month for a virtual server, €20 excl. VAT for a physical server. It handles the takeover over an IPsec VPN, without any change of IP address.
Two preparation examples, not offers:
- One small virtual server, 50 GB: storage €8.75 + instance €50.22 + agent €6, i.e. about €65 excl. VAT per month, about €780 excl. VAT per year, if the base instance is sufficient.
- Three virtual servers, 1 TB in total: storage €175, three entry-level instances (€150.66), three agents (€18), i.e. about €344 excl. VAT per month if each instance fits within the starting tier, which is optimistic for real production servers.
Compared with SMART backup at €49.99 excl. VAT per TB, which keeps no server running, the difference corresponds to the availability you are buying.
These amounts do not include replication or synchronisation of data between the BCP instance and the original server, which is not native: it relies on a specific process, tailored to the need, which WeDoBack can set up on quotation.
Frequently asked questions
Why does a BCP cost more than a DRP?
Because a BCP keeps compute, memory and monitoring running permanently, whereas a DRP starts its instances when the decision is taken. NIST, the US standards body, ranks ‘hot’ standby sites, ready immediately, as the most expensive, and ‘cold’ sites as the cheapest but slowest.
Do software licences have to be paid twice?
It depends on the licence agreements. Some vendors allow a passive standby instance, others charge for every running instance. Check this point before signing, for each business application concerned.
Over a year without a disaster, is a DRP cheaper?
Usually yes, since activation is not billed. Over a year with an outage lasting several days, you need to add up the DRP’s activation days; the BCP has already built that cost into the subscription.
Further reading
Sources
Documents consulted in October 2026.
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