Site Collection, as the name means, is a collection of one or more sites. A Site collection will at least have one top-level site and optionally subsites created under that site. In this article, we are going to create a Site Collection manually in SharePoint 2013.

Step-by-step process to create site collection manually

1. Go to Central Administration >> Application Management >> Create site collections

2. On Create Site Collection page, as shown below, either (1) Select existing Web application or (2) Create a new Web Application.

3. Title and Description:

1. Title: Enter Title of your new site collection
2. Description: Enter description of the new Site collection
3. URL: Enter URL (relative) of the new site collection. The first part of the URL will be your web application.
4. Managed Path: Here managed path is /sites/. You can go to the link Define Managed Paths to add a new URL path.
4. Template Selection:

1. Select Experience version: This screenshot is taken from SharePoint 2013, so along with 2013 you will get 2010 in this drop down. Select whatever version you want to select. I prefer to go ahead with latest, i.e. 2013
2. Select a template: Select the site template that you want for the new site collection
3. Primary Site Collection Administrator: Enter one user in this box. This user will be added into new site collection as a Site Collection Administrator. This is a mandatory field. You cannot add a group over here.
4. Secondary Site Collection Administrator: This is NOT mandatory. Again, you can assign only a user over here. The user you add over here will be added to new site collection as a Site Collection Administrator.
5. Quota Template:
   Using this option, you can control how much data a site collection can hold and the storage limit of resources. When you apply a quota template to a site collection, the storage limit applies to the site collection and all its subsites. Leave it to No Quota. You can later set it from Central Administration.
   
   

6. Press OK. New Site collection is created.

Conclusion:

We have gone through all the steps and their use/importance in order to create Site Collection. The steps mentioned over here were performed on SharePoint 2013 on-premise environment.