Site and Site Collections

Users are often encountered with questions or statements like:

1.       Do you want a site or a site collection?

    2.       The functionality has to be enabled at Site collection level
    3.       This feature is not available at site level

Site collection and Sites are both containers that store your data. The major difference is Sites can only be created under a Site collection. So in a way Site Collections are parent to Sites.

Due to the above relationship, Sites can and do inherit a lot of features from Site collections but at the same time there are a lot of differences between the two. Web application are one level above site collections. The figure below shows the relationship.

 
 
 
There are many differences between Sites and Site collections like:

·         You can apply quota to Site Collection but can not do it for site

    ·         Search settings can be better managed at Site collections
    ·         URL for Site collections can be more flexible using managed path

You can also create subsites under the sites. Sites are generally used for grouping the content within Site collection and same way subsites can be used to group the content within Sites.

You should consider following scenarios while choosing between site and site collection :

1.       Size – If your data is going to grow large, consider having a site collection. Sites sometimes compete with other sites within its parent site collection.

2.       Branding – If you want to brand your content similar to other Sites/ Site collection, it is a good option to create a Site or sub-site. This way you can easily inherit the branding of your parent site without much effort

3.       Look up list – You can not create look up lists when the data is in different site collection.

4.       Back up  - You can easily back up data if you have stored it in different DB which can be done using different site collection

5.       Security inheritance – You can easily inherit the security permission in a site , but can not be done across site collections

6.       Navigation – Navigation is consistent if you create multiple sites under same site collection.