When trying to take advantage of the Sharepoint Self-service in Sharepoint 2010, we attempted to provide to access a group of user with as little Sharepoint rights as possible. Looking it the rights, the obvious only selection to give rights to was

Use Self-Service Site Creation

Giving that right only gave the infamous “Access Denied” from Sharepoint. So after looking a bit further into the basic rights of Sharepoint 2010, I came across this page, which displays all the permission levels + the name of the groups that has them as default. Here you can see some permissions that has the listing of “All”, so in order to provide minimum rights to a user, you also have to give those permissions which are:

• View application pages
• View Pages
• Browse User Information
• Open

So the conclusion was, that to give minimum rights to a user to create sites via self-service, you actually need to grant 5 permissions.