How Do I Estimate Size Hosted Feature Layer will Be?

[VCGIvanBrown]

I'm considering migrating about 100 ArcGIS Server service layers to ArcGIS Online hosted feature layers. I need to estimate the amounts of storage the feature layers will have in ArcGIS Online (to estimate the cost).

So, given that the hosted feature layer is very similar to the geodatabase format, I used ArcGIS Pro's Catalog view to see sizes of source feature classes in file-geodatabase format. That's easy.

However, when testing a sample set of the feature classes by publishing them to ArcGIS Online as feature layers, the sizes of those feature layers in ArcGIS Online are wildly different (larger) than their source feature-class counterparts; also, the percent increase isn't linear--it varies a lot by layer.

For example, a .gdb feature class that has a size of 152.422 MB generates a feature layer that has a size of 467.781 MB; that is 3.07 times bigger.

For another example, a .gdb feature class that has a size of 315.73 MB generates a feature layer that has a size of 514.141 MB; that is 1.63 times bigger.

And another example...  a 21.077 MB .gdb feature class generates a 75.797 MB feature layer; that is 3.6 times bigger.

My organization needs to know about how much it will cost to store the hundred layers. How am I supposed to estimate that without actually creating the hundred layers?

[SteveCole]

Credit usage is laid out on the website here but you can always contact your rep to try and get a better idea for your situation (how many credits you get with your maintenance, etc).

Something else that's less clear to me is if there is any "upcharging" of credit usage if you have something that suddenly becomes high demand (which would, in turn, require backside ramping up of capability). I don't see anything on the linked page about that but I feel like I had read or heard that somewhere. That's something your rep could probably confirm/rebuke.

[ScottB]

Hi Steve - 

Just to be clear, there is no upcharging of credit usage for popular / high-demand content. Storage costs are calculated based on the size of the content, not how much they are used. 

[DavidSolari]

If your Org has access to the Enterprise installation files you can see if you can spin up a minimal deployment as a "development" system (i.e. no license costs) and dump your data in there. That way you can see exactly what the storage space will be, or at least very close given the minor changes between 11.4 and the current Online build.

[ScottB]

Hi - thanks for the question. Unfortunately there isn't a tool or calculator that can estimate the storage size of a hosted feature layer. Per the ArcGIS Online FAQ:

Why doesn't my ArcGIS Online hosted feature layer have the same storage size as the local file from which it was published?

ArcGIS Online hosted feature data is stored in a format suited and optimized for its underlying data store and may consume more storage space than it would in a compressed file-based format such as a file geodatabase, shapefile, or service definition stored on the file system. As data becomes more complex with increasing fields, indexes, data constraints, vertices, multipart features, attachments, and data types (such as text, numeric, binary, and spatial data), variation between prepublished and published feature data storage sizes may be more significant. Due to these variations in file formats and data complexity, there is no standard ratio that can estimate the potential storage size of a local file prior to publishing it in ArcGIS Online.