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While working with a client recently we came upon a seemingly simple question. How big, in terms of business scope, should a SharePoint site collection be? The question is a good one because it gets at the heart of how to architect your SharePoint Solution. You can decide on a model with only a few site collections -- or one where there are a large number of site collections. In this article, I'll take you through a process of evaluating the needs of your business units and how to design a strategy and make individual decisions.

Default Answers

There are two basic approaches to the question of when a site should be in a new site collection. Either you default to everything in a separate site collection or you default to keeping everything in one site collection. In either case, you look for reasons why the default answer might not be correct. For instance, something like disaster recovery or security would lead you down the path of having separate site collections even if your default answer is to have only a single site collection.

Issues like wanting to leverage the out of box web parts that allow you to aggregate information from within a site collection lead you down the path of having fewer site collections. There are many things in SharePoint that are scoped at the site collection level, such as SharePoint groups, and roll up web parts. These would lead you towards the idea of having a single site collection even if your default strategy is to make everything its own site collection.

Let's first take the position of having a single site collection for everything. Even medium sized organization will likely have more than one site collection. That's because they have storage or security concerns that will push them towards multiple site collections.

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However, smaller organizations may be able to work with a single site collection, so it's not a bad place to start the thinking.

Site Collections and Storage

If you're working from the approach that everything should be in one site collection, the greatest factor for breaking site collections apart is the total amount of storage that will be consumed by the content. That is because a site collection must live within a single content database and there's a practical (but not technical) limit to the size of a content database. The consensus seems to be that content databases shouldn't be more than 50GB to 100GB unless there's a good reason. That means that no site collection should be more than 50GB to 100GB. Sure you can have multiple smaller site collections in one content database as long as the storage for all of those site collections doesn't exceed the 50GB to 100GB guideline.

Great, but where did the 50GB to 100GB guideline come from? It comes from the idea that you want to be able to recover the SharePoint data in the case of a failure. In today's world backing up 100GB chunks is pretty challenging and takes a fair amount of time. If you want to commit to a service level agreement for recovery of data you need to keep the actual restore time pretty low. By breaking them into 50GB-100GB chunks you can manage the recovery process better.

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