Lime Survey Web Hosting

Lime Survey Web Hosting

LimeSurvey – formerly known as PHP Surveyor is an open source PHP web application which is used to develop, publish and collect responses to online and offline surveys. This open source online survey application is written in PHP and uses a MySQL database back-end. The LimeSurvey application includes a wide ranged variety of built-in question types along with a wide range of flexible options to choose from. He surveys could include branching, custom preferred layout and design (using a web template system), and can provide basic statistical analysis of survey results. These surveys can either be public or can be controlled though the use of “once-only” tokens for each survey participant.

LimeSurvey is available in multiple languages, and it uses a UTF-8 character set. The primary translations include: Basque, Chinese, Dutch, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hungarian, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish and many other partial translations.

Formerly called PHPSurveyor; LimeSurvey was first registered as a SourceForge.net project on February 20, 2003 and the first public release, version 0.93, was published on March 5, 2003.
LimeSurvey has been released under the GPL license v2 or later which means it is available it is available free of cost while adhering to the terms of the GPL license. Under the GPL license; the recipients are allowed the following freedom:

• To run the program; for any purpose.
• To study how the program works, and modify it.
• To redistribute copies.
• To improve the program, and release the improvements to the public.

However, the GPL does not give the licensee unlimited redistribution rights. The right to redistribute is granted only if the licensee includes the source code (or a legally-binding offer to provide the source code), including any modifications made.
LimeSurvey offers a host of utilizable and flexible features which make this software and new ones are frequently added to enhance its functionality. Its key features include:

• Unlimited number of surveys at the same time
• Unlimited number of questions in a survey (only limited by your database)
• Unlimited number of participants to a survey
• Multi-Lingual Surveys
• User-Management
• 20 different question types with more to come
• Creation of a printable survey version
• Ability to set conditions for questions depending on earlier answers (branching the survey)
• Re-usable editable answer sets
• Ready-made importable questions
• Assessment surveys
• Anonymous and Not-Anonymous survey
• Open and closed group of participant surveys
• Optional public registration for surveys
• Sending of invitations, reminders and tokens by email
• Option for participants to buffer answers to continue survey at a later time
• Cookie or session based surveys
• Template editor for creating your own page layout
• Extended and user-friendly administration interface
• Back-office data entry possibility
• Survey expiry dates for automation
• Enhanced import and export functions to text, CSV and MS Excel format
• Basic statistical and graphical analysis with export facility

It supports more than 25 different languages both in front-end and backend to cater to wide range of world wide audience.
LimeSurvey does not have limitations regarding speed and survey size. It all depends on how fast the server and your connection is. However, the database engine may have several limits. The most important one is the limit on the number of fields (columns) in the result table.
There are web hosting services out there which offer LimeSurvey hosting either as a custom installation or through a control panel, such as cPanel with Fantastico, Plesk, and Virtualmin Professional. It can also be ported to content management systems, such as PostNuke and XOOPS. LimeSurvey is ranked highly on SourceForge.net, with an overall rank of 181 out of over 100,000 projects as of March 16, 2007. PHPSurveyor was later changed to be called LimeSurvey on May 17, 2007 in order to make software licensing easier by not including PHP in the name.