FAQ: Data hosting

You can create and publish your data with data services if you have a subscription to ArcGIS Platform, ArcGIS Online, or ArcGIS Enterprise and you have an ArcGIS account. The type of ArcGIS product and account you have will determine the data services you can publish. The account user type and privileges required will vary depending on the types of services you need to publish and the service capabilities you need to enable. The data management tools available to create data services will also vary depending on the type of product and account you have.

The table below lists the types of data services you can publish.

Depending on the type of ArcGIS product you have, there are some differences related to how you work with data services and what functionality is available. The table below highlights the key differences:

The type of data service you use depends on the product you have, the format of your existing data, storage and output data format requirements, the size and complexity of the data, and the service functionality required.

Below is an overview of the main services and the data type each supports.

You can use many different ArcGIS Maps SDKs, open source libraries, and scripting APIs to access data services. You can also access the services directly with ArcGIS REST APIs.

To achieve the best performance and scalability possible, it is always recommended to use the ArcGIS Maps SDKs. The ArcGIS Maps SDKs are optimized to access and display data from services in many ways. The are also designed to take advantage of accessing all data service functionality, drawing optimizations, client-side queries, CDN caching, and server-side caching.

The ArcGIS Maps SDKs also work with feature services efficiently to cache data. They will satisfy query requests using client-side caches when the data is available rather than making additional requests to the service. To achieve scalable performance the ArcGIS Maps SDKs automatically make use of dynamic feature tile queries when displaying feature layers from feature services. This enables automatic change-aware response caching of these shareable tile responses at origin servers as well as in the global CDN. This is essential to achieving scalable performance for viral mapping applications that may experience heavy load from tens or hundreds of thousands of concurrent users. The alternative is the publishing of vector tile services or map tile services together with alternative mechanisms to keep them up to date as data changes.

A hosted feature layer, also referred to as a hosted feature layer (item), is an item in a portal that you use to manage the properties and settings of a feature layer and feature service. A feature layer is a server-side dataset that can be accessed through a feature service. A feature layer contains features with the geometry type and set of attributes.

The level of security is controlled by the sharing level you set for the data service. To set the sharing level, you use a hosted layer (item).

The sharing levels available for different products are listed below:

In general, three types of authentication that can be used to get an access token and access services:

1. API key authentication (ArcGIS Platform only)
2. User authentication
3. App credential authentication

Different authentication types result in access tokens with different privileges and account associations. The type of authentication you use will depend on the security and access requirements of your app.

No, your data is your data. You retain complete ownership of your content.

No, Esri does not collect telemetry data from your users.

Private data hosting means that only users with an ArcGIS account who are authorized can access the service. To make a service private, you have set the sharing level to Owner, Group, or Organization. To access the service, it requires an application to implement a type of authentication and an access token is required.

Public data hosting means anyone can access the service. To make a service public you have to set the sharing level to Everyone. No authentication is required to access the service.

The support table below shows the type of data hosting available for different products:

The best practices you should follow largely depend on the data services you are using, the size and complexity of the data, the functionality required, and how many users will access your application, but in general consider the following:

• Use ArcGIS Maps SDKs to display and query features
• Configure the CDN cache
• Enable drawing optimization
• Configure field and spatial indexes
• Only enable editing on layers that require updates
• Use feature layer views instead of uploading your data more than once
• Search for strings with full-text indexes instead of using the "LIKE" operator
• Consider rebuilding spatial indexes
• Use repeatable queries instead of unique queries
• Use client-side queries instead of server-side queries
• Consider publishing vector tile services or map tile services to display datasets with many features
• Only include the required attributes when publishing vector tile services
• Only build map tile caches for the visible range (zoom levels) required
• Consider manually generating map tile caches for areas that will be frequently visited
• Consider upgrading your feature data store

ArcGIS Platform, ArcGIS Online, and ArcGIS Enterprise all offer similar data storage and hosting capabilities. The most common types of data stored are features (feature services), vector tiles (vector tile services), and map tiles (map tile services). You can also store many other types of content items in your portal such as maps, layers, styles, tools, applications, files, and notebooks.

You can use data management tools such as ArcGIS.com, ArcGIS Enterprise portal, and ArcGIS Pro to import your data to ArcGIS. You can also use ArcGIS API for Python to write scripts to import data.

When using ArcGIS Platform and ArcGIS Online, your feature service data are stored in cloud-based servers that are designed to be robust and optimized for geospatial applications. However, in order to meet the higher performance and scalability requirements of some applications, the following feature data store options are available:

1. Basic Feature Data Store: ArcGIS Platform includes a basic feature service data store. The basic database is designed to perform well for applications designed to host up to 100 GB of feature storage while servicing up to a few thousand users.

2. Standard Feature Data Store: ArcGIS Online includes the standard data store which improves both performance and storage capacity over the Basic feature data store. Standard is designed to handle large volumes of data and support a high number of concurrent users. The standard database is designed to perform well for applications designed to host up to 500 GB of feature storage while servicing up to several thousand users. The underlying infrastructure is engineered to scale resources as needed, ensuring optimal performance even during peak usage periods. ArcGIS Online organizations are created with a Standard feature data store.

3. Premium Feature Data Store: This option is available if you have ArcGIS Online. The premium database offers fixed feature data store pricing and greater support for intensive and high-volume data workflows. The entry point for Premium Feature Data Store is M1, which provides double the database processing power of Standard Feature Data Store. Each additional Premium Feature Data Store level provides twice the processing power of the previous, up to M4.

If you have ArcGIS Online, your data can be migrated between Standard Feature Data Store and Premium Feature Data Store. However, data can not be migrated either from or to Basic Feature Data Store.

Data store summary

Regional data hosting refers to the region where your hosted geospatial data is stored. It allows you to store your content and data in different regions such as United States, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. Regional data hosting can reduce network latency and improve the overall performance of accessing data services from your region of the world. It can also help support data localization and regulatory requirements for different regions.

Regional data hosting includes the following types of content and data:

• Features (feature services)
• Vector tiles (vector tile services) and map tiles (map tile services)
• Data files (feature attachments and document items)
• Web maps

All other content and user information — for example, subscriber and subscription information, item metadata, groups and sharing information, and usage accounting — is stored and managed in the United States. In addition, other location services such as geocoding, routing, places, and GeoEnrichment run in the United States.

Regional data hosting is available for Standard Feature Data Store and Premium Feature Data Store. The location is selected when the service is purchased and cannot be changed after purchase. Regions include the United States, Europe, and Asia-Pacific.

To enable regional data hosting, please contact us.

Data data storage refers to all of the content items stored in your portal and the data that supports your data services.

The two types of data storage you are charged for are:

1. Feature storage: The total storage size of the features stored in feature service databases.
2. Tiles, files and attachments storage: The total storage size of map tiles (map tile services) and vector tiles (vector tile services), items that represent files such as shapefiles, GeoJSON, and CSVs, and feature attachments such as images or PDFs. This also includes the size of the item metadata.

Storage costs are computed based on the type of ArcGIS product and account you have:

ArcGIS Platform (ArcGIS developer accounts)

The storage that is consumed by your ArcGIS account is computed each day of your billing month and the final billing amount is calculated at the end of the last day of your billing month. The storage billing is then reset at the start of the billing month.

Your storage is sampled 24 times per day. Each hourly sample deducts the available free tier of storage allocated to your account. Then a billable amount is determined for that hour. The billable amount is multiplied by the cost of the service for 1 hour considering the number of days in the current month. Each hourly sample is added to provide a total cost for 1 day, and the daily cost is added each day to a monthly total. The storage amount is averaged hourly to accommodate abrupt fluctuations while adding and deleting data so the average provides a smoother picture of the data stored over the span of a day. Separate hourly storage averages are computed for Feature service storage and Tile and data storage.

For example, if you store 200 MB for the entire day, the 24 hourly samples should add up to the same cost as 1 day of storage based on the number of days in the current month. For July, this is (200 MB stored - 100 MB free tier) * (0.024 cost per MB / 31 days in month) = $0.077419. At $0.077419 per day added up over 31 days is $2.40.

ArcGIS Online (ArcGIS online accounts)

The storage that is consumed by all of your ArcGIS organization accounts is computed each day at the end of the day (5:00 PM Pacific Time.) The number of credits are deducted from your organization credit total each day.

Your storage is sampled 24 times per day. A billable amount is determined each hour. The billable amount is multiplied by the cost of the service in credits for 1 hour considering the number of days in the current month. Each hourly sample is added to provide a total cost for 1 day, and the daily cost is deducted from the organization credit total. The storage amount is averaged hourly to accommodate abrupt fluctuations while adding and deleting data so the average provides a smoother picture of the data stored over the span of a day. Separate hourly storage averages are computed for Feature service storage and Tile and data storage.

Yes, you can create API keys and use them in your applications to access feature services, vector tile services, and map tile services. For feature services, they are limited to read-only operations only. The API key needs to be scoped to access the hosted layer (item) and data service you would like to access. You can create and manage up to 100 API keys in your organization. If you need to create more than 100 API keys, please contact us.

The maximum number of content items e.g. feature layers, vector tile layers, or map tile layers you can scope to an API key is 100.

If you have ArcGIS Platform, the use of data services data is metered in bytes of bandwidth transmitted from ArcGIS servers to any application that accesses your services.

The different types of data bandwidth you are charged for are:

• Feature service queries
• Feature service edits
• Vector tiles
• Map tiles

You are not charged bandwidth costs when importing and uploading data to be stored in any of the data services. However, if you choose to create hosted feature or tile services from the data being uploaded you will incur bandwidth or tile generation usage.

If you have ArcGIS Platform, you will incur bandwidth usage any time a data service you own is accessed by an application. When an ArcGIS server responds to a query and sends the bytes to a client application, that usage is metered.

Examples of when you will incur bandwidth usage include the following:

• Displaying and/or querying feature services from a client application.
• Editing, updating, and synchronizing features in feature services.
• Accessing and displaying hosted layer (items) in your portal, ArcGIS Map Viewer, Scene Viewer, or any other application.
• Managing hosted layer (items) and data services with ArcGIS.com, Developer dashboard, or ArcGIS Pro
• Publishing map tile or vector tile services and then accessing the services from a client application.
• Publishing vector tile services and creating custom styles with the Vector Tile Style Editor.
• Accessing and displaying data services in applications you create by following tutorials and workflows.

Yes. To review the details, go to Service Level Agreement - ArcGIS Platform.

If you don't have a credit card on file, once you exhaust your free tier of hosted data services your account is no longer able to use (access, display, or manage) any of the data services until you do one of the following:

1. Add a valid payment method to your account.
2. At the beginning of your next billing term your free tiers are reset with the exception of data storage. If you are over your free tier of storage then you must either delete some data to return to the free tier or add a valid payment method.

If your ArcGIS Platform account is suspended it is usually due to going over the free tier by a significant amount and maintaining a negative balance. In this case, you have two options to continue:

1. Add a valid payment method to your account.
2. Contact customer service.

With the recent release and support for data hosting with ArcGIS Platform, we removed the ability to set the sharing level to everyone (public). The sharing level can only be set to owner (private). Therefore, all applications need to implement a type of authentication and need to have the appropriate credentials to access all hosted data services. This was done to ensure the secure usage of your data and services. To learn more about data hosting and managing the sharing level for data services, go to Data hosting and Manage sharing and security.

If you monitor your storage usage closely you may notice occasional small fluctuations in the usage graphs even though the amount you have stored stays the same. Data in these graphs is averaged over a number of samples taken throughout each day.

• Usage will fluctuate down occasionally when one or more of the sampling periods is interrupted which will cause the averages to drop. This may happen for maintenance, deployments, or when various services restart.
• Usage will fluctuate up or down at the start and end of a month because the storage calculations are based on the number of hours in a month so moving between months with different counts of days will affect the averages.