How to increase the capacity of your SPO tenant?

According to Microsoft latest article regarding SharePoint Online software boundaries and limits, the maximum size of a tenant can be 1 TB and can contain no more than 500,000 site collections. The minimum storage allocation per site collection is 100 MB. The default tenant storage is (10 GB + number of subscribed users * 500 MB). So if we have a customer with 20 subscribed users, the default assigned size for the tenant will be 10 GB + (10 * 500 MB) = 15 GB.

Beside the assigned tenant size, every subscribed user receives 1 TB of extra capacity as soon as personal site is provisioned for that user.

In some scenarios a customer may want to increase the storage capacity. We had a customer that needed to increase the capacity of a tenant by 50 GB, in aim to migrate documents from a file server to SharePoint Online. We couldn’t find any solution to add more capacity from the Office 365 admin center. The subscription was purchased as open subscription and no add-ons were available beneath “Purchase Service”.

The customer had in this situation two options, the first one was to buy 100 more subscriptions and receive 100 * 500 MB, which could give 50 GB. But this option was unnecessary and very expensive. If the customer have chosen this option it would have cost them 41,000 Swedish krona/year.

The second and the better option was to add a SharePoint Online P1 subscription with only 1 user and then add capacity add-on for 50 GB. This will cost them 1500 Swedish crowns/year!

Here are the steps to add the capacity:

• Navigate and logon to your Office 365 admin center
• On the left menu press PURCHASE SERVICES
• From available service find SharePoint Online (Plan 1)

• On the right side press Add

• Ensure that you have only 1 user license
• Beneath the user license you will find a drop down arrow for optional add-ons
• Press the arrow and fill the desired capacity

• Press add to the cart
• Then press check out
• Pay by a credit card for athe entire year or per month.

• Your order will be processed and the capacity will be added to your tenant
• Then you can use it for any Site collection you need to expand