Using STSADM.EXE to Create Empty Site Collection

There are situations when we want to create empty site collection, like when your content deployment job is failing due to conflicting content. In these cases STSADM.EXE comes handy.

STSADM.EXE is the only means to create a completely empty site collection.


Syntax
STSADM.EXE -o createsite -url -ownerlogin domain\user -owneremail

Example
STSADM.EXE -o createsite -url http://servername:9009/sites/EmptySiteCollectionName -ownerlogin mydomain\praveen -owneremail abc@xyz.com

Remember, using the “Blank Site” template does NOT creates an completely empty site collection. The site collection created by “Blank Site” template create some content for default website.
You can see the difference if you create a site collection using both methods and then inspect the content of the created sites using SharePoint designer.