See my other comment [1] re: my experience at Potbelly. Restaurant usage is extremely bursty. For a lot of restaurants in business-y areas, you basically have a

See my other comment [1] re: my experience at Potbelly. Restaurant usage is extremely bursty. For a lot of restaurants in business-y areas, you basically have a single spike of traffic from roughly 11:30 to 13:30 that drives >90% of the day's sales. You miss that, and you may as well write off the entire day's revenue. Investing in the redundancy (two internet connections, three servers, etc) to ensure that the point-of-sale system is online for that spike can be worth it, even for a relatively low-margin business. In fact, it might be more important for a low-margin business given the ephemeral nature of restaurant sales. It's not like e.g. Amazon, where if you're down for a few hours it doesn't matter, because customers will wait to buy their knick-knacks. If you're down for a lunch rush, you've lost that day's sales forever. After all, it's not as if customers are going to stay hungry and come back and buy two sandwiches tomorrow. They'll just go somewhere else for lunch. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34350556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34350556