ArcGIS Online hosting feature layers credit usage

[AdamTaube]

I recently designed a story map that uses a series of 6 USA school-district level maps. https://arcg.is/zDb4u

The hosted feature layers for these maps ended up being fairly sizable files with ~13k rows each. I realized recently that I’m utilizing ArcGIS Online credits at an alarming rate of about 26 credits per day to preserve to host the feature layers for the story map.

I have a few questions regarding this situation:

1. If I run out of credits, will the web maps embedded in my story map cease to function? I’m not sure what it would mean in this case for my account to become ‘restricted’ or how that would impact peoples' ability to access my existing published content.
2. Since the underlying school-district shapefile for all these maps are the same, would I use significantly fewer credits if I combined all my fields used for color gradients into one table and switched to just having 1 hosted feature layer with more fields? Then I’m thinking that I would have to change the chosen field for the shape-filled color gradient in ArcGIS Online’s symbology tool to recreate each of the web maps. Does that make sense?

Thank you!

[David_McRitchie]

Hey @AdamTaube ,

My understanding is that the layers wouldn't immediately cease to function, and that credits will continued to be charged. In order to recover the account out of restricted status any credit debt would need to be resolved.

In regards to point 2 yes I believe this should reduce the size considerably, as you effectively would be cutting down 6 layers, with tabular and spatial data into 1 layer. The size of the tabular data will increase, but you wouldn't have the size of 6 copies of spatial data impacting your credits.

I am not very familiar with the data but I would certainly check to see if you can access this via the Living Atlas. These layers are hosted either by Esri or other organisations and ready for use. Since you don't have to host these, you wont need to use any of your credits for storage. From looking at your Storymap, the following Living Atlas item might allow this? 

Hope that helps!

David