Managing Resources in SharePoint Online (Office365) Site Collections – "You are approaching the maximum storage limit"

Recently, I ran into a problem on my Office365-based SharePoint site. I’ve got an E1 account so that I can test how things work in the cloud. When I went to add a new Site Collection, I saw the message below in yellow.

This message itself didn’t make sense to me, since I have only uploaded a few tens of megabytes of content to the account so far across the three Site Collections that I had set up at the time. There’s no way I’d even started to get close to my storage limits. Note that the screen is also telling me that I have 0 resources and 0 MB available.

The thing that stopped me in my tracks was that the New button on the ribbon was greyed out, so I couldn’t create a new Site Collection. I checked the online help, and I should have been able to create up to 300 Site Collections (see below), and I only had three so far. Something wasn’t right.

I filed a service request online with Office365 to try to get things sorted out. Since I did this through the Web site, I assumed, and preferred, that we could work it out through email. I always believe that the way a customer initiates a service request ought to be the default follow up method. The first reply back said that we needed to schedule a phone call to figure this out. This became a theme in the eight emails I received from Microsoft support on this issue.

I say Microsoft support, but it became very clear that this is probably an outsourced function. The answers were only tangentially related to my issue and seemed fairly pat in nature. I tried to point out that I am a SharePoint MVP (I don’t often haul that into a conversation, but they seemed to think I had no idea what I was doing), but that didn’t make any difference. The most frustrating part of this was that, even after repeated suggestions from my end, they didn’t seem to be looking at my account at all. They just sent me standard information about how SharePoint Online works, like the information at the bottom of this post. It wasn’t that the information wasn’t interesting to read through. It simply didn’t address my specific issue, and made it clear that they probably weren’t looking at my account at all.

Finally, after more suggestions that we had to solve this via phone, we got to the bottom of the issue. It wasn’t that I was nearing my storage usage limit, but that the storage quota was used up. Here is the message from Microsoft support that finally got me there.

Issue Resolution:-

-> You need to reduce the storage Quota for [MySiteURL] (9450MB) . You need to select that site from “Site Collection” and click on “Storage Quota” on ribbon and reduce the “Limit storage quota for each selected site collection to a maximum of: ” .

-> Or you need to add some test users and provide them Licenses so that you would get 500 megabytes (MB) per enterprise user.

This will help you to Increase your MB available and then you would be able to create new site.

That answer still didn’t tell me that they had looked at my account (I certainly don’t need another 500Mb of storage for another user when I’m only using maybe 20Mb so far). But by reducing the Storage Quota for the existing Site Collections, I got rid of the initial issue. It turned out that I also had to reduce the Resource Usage Quota for the Site Collections so that I wasn’t bumping up against that total limit as well.

 

Once I knew the solution, it seemed obvious, of course, but this is certainly something that could be spelled out more clearly on the screen. If I couldn’t figure it out, so it’s bound to be confusing to many others. The other weird thing is that I’m pretty sure that both the Storage Quota and the Resource Usage Quota were set to the maximum available when I created the Demos Site Collection. I’m sure that there was a message of some sort, but it must not have been clear enough to help me set the values more intelligently.

Hopefully, the messages for these two issues will be improved in the future, In case they aren’t, I figured I’d post what I went through in case someone Bingles the “You are approaching the maximum storage limit” message.

Here’s the useful info I mentioned above about the E1 plan.

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Key Features and Specifications

Table 7 provides a quick look at some of the key features and specifications of SharePoint Online.

Table 7: SharePoint Online key features and specifications

Feature	Description
Storage (pooled)	10 gigabytes (GB) base customer storage plus 500 megabytes (MB) per enterprise user
Storage per Kiosk Worker	Zero (0). Licensed Kiosk Workers do not bring additional storage allocation.
Storage per external user	Zero (0). Licensed external users do not bring additional storage allocation.
Additional storage (per GB per month); no minimum purchase.	$2.50USD/GB/month
Site collection storage quotas	Up to 100 gigabytes (GB) per site collection
My Site storage allocation (does not count against tenant’s overall storage pool)	500 megabytes (MB) of personal storage per My Site (once provisioned) *Note: the storage amount on individual’s My Site storage cannot be adjusted.
Site collections (#) per tenant	Up to 300 (non-My Site site collections)
Total storage per tenant	Up to 5 terabyte (TB) per tenant
File upload limit	250 megabytes (MB) per file
External Users (PALs)	50 PALs are included per tenant. Current “Feature Preview” allows for usage rights of up to 1000 external users without requiring additional PALs. Microsoft reserves the right to charge for additional PALs beyond 50 at the time the next major Office 365 update.
Microsoft Office support	Microsoft Access 2010 Microsoft Excel® 2007 and 2010 Microsoft InfoPath® 2010 Outlook 2007 and 2010 Microsoft OneNote 2010 PowerPoint 2007 and 2010 Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010 Word 2007 and 2010 SharePoint Workspace 2010 Project Professional 2010
Browser support	Internet Explorer 7 Internet Explorer 8 Internet Explorer 9 Firefox 3 and higher Safari 3.1.2 on Macintosh OS X 10.5 Chrome
Mobile device support	Windows Phone 7.5 codenamed “Mango” or later Windows Mobile® 6.1 or later Nokia S60 3.0 or later Apple iPhone 3.0 or later Blackberry 4.2 or later Android 1.5 or later

Storage

SharePoint Online allocates an initial 10 GB of storage plus 500 MB for each user. This storage is pooled and available for allocation across multiple site collections. For example, an organization of 1,000 users by default would have a base of 510,000 MB (510 GB) of storage.

In addition, users can purchase more SharePoint Online storage in GB increments charged monthly, currently $2.50USD/GB/month.

Site Storage Quotas

The SharePoint Online service administrator can set the storage limits for site collections and sites created by users. The minimum storage allocated to a new site collection is 24 megabytes (MB). The maximum storage available for any site collection is up to 100 gigabytes (GB).

The maximum SharePoint Online storage available to a single company’s tenancy is up to 5 terabytes (TB).

Note

For more information about storage quotas, review SharePoint Online: software boundaries and limits at the Office.com site.

Site Collections

A site collection consists of a top-level site and its subsites. SharePoint Online lets users allocate their available storage space across up to 300 site collections. Site collections are often based on departmental boundaries. My Sites (personal site collections) do not count against this overall number of team site oriented site collections, nor do My Sites pull from the pool of storage; each My Site, once provisioned, is allocated 500 megabytes (MB) of personal storage.

Sites within a site collection share common features, such as galleries for templates, content types, Web Parts, and custom solutions uploaded to the site collection solution gallery. A subsite can inherit permissions and navigation structure from its parent site, or these can be specified and managed independently. See the TechNet article Determine permission levels and groups (SharePoint Server 2010) for details.