Online survey creation and data collection tools for conducting research, gathering feedback, and analysing responses. All available with one-click installation on 365i web hosting.
Survey software collects structured answers from people and puts them somewhere you can analyse them. The commercial market prices that by response volume, which is where the arithmetic starts to matter. SurveyMonkey's Team Advantage plan is £20 per user per month billed annually, with 50,000 responses a year and £0.15 for each response past it. Typeform's Basic plan is US$28 a month for 100 responses a month. Qualtrics quotes rather than publishes. Google Forms is free, and for a simple feedback form it's frequently the right answer.
LimeSurvey is the open-source alternative in this category, and it's a serious one. Written in PHP, developed since 2003 and looked after by LimeSurvey GmbH in Hamburg, it's widely used by universities and research groups for the kind of questionnaire hosted tools handle badly: conditional branching across dozens of questions, quotas, randomised blocks, several languages inside one instrument, and export straight into SPSS or R. Version 7 is the current line and needs PHP 8.1.29 or newer, with the 6.x line still available alongside it.
People rarely self-host it purely over the licence fee. It's usually response limits that don't exist and question logic no hosted tool will sell you, with data residency close behind.
Situations we see often. If one of these sounds like you, this category is worth a look.
Ethics approval routinely requires naming where response data is stored and for how long it is kept. A self-hosted install in a UK data centre answers that directly, and the SPSS and R exports drop straight into the analysis the researchers already run.
One survey a year to 8,000 members would eat a mid-tier hosted plan's annual response allowance in a fortnight. Self-hosted, the cost is the hosting, and the second survey of the year costs nothing extra.
Public consultations need accessible forms, sometimes a bilingual version, and a defensible answer about data handling. LimeSurvey runs multilingual surveys as one instrument rather than as separate copies, which keeps the response set together for analysis.
Short recurring surveys with invitation and reminder emails are cheap to run in-house and expensive per seat when hosted. Send the invitations through a transactional provider rather than the shared mail server and this works well on a modest plan.
Theoretically there would also be no limit on the maximum number of questions/answers in LimeSurvey. But the database engine you are using has several limits.
This is the constraint that catches people out, and it is worth understanding before you design a long instrument. Each activated survey gets its own table with roughly a column per question or subquestion, and MySQL with InnoDB tops out near a thousand columns per table. A 400-question survey full of matrix grids can reach that. Do the arithmetic first, or split the survey.
LimeSurvey neither discloses any user data publicly nor transfers any user data to any third party without explicit consent.
A reasonable promise, and self-hosting is how you stop needing to rely on one. On your own install there is no third party in the response path at all: you are the data controller and your host is the processor. The trade is that retention, access requests and deletion all become your job rather than a vendor feature.
Survey platforms are mostly database-heavy at submission time and storage-heavy in the longer term. We tune MySQL for sustained writes during a survey window, raise PHP memory to 256MB to cope with logic-heavy questionnaires, and run nightly database backups as a separate retention from the file backup because the responses are usually the only digital copy of the data. For institutions running surveys to several thousand respondents, a managed cloud server gives predictable submission performance.
LimeSurvey is one of the better-behaved applications on this list to host, and the places it strains are predictable. Collection itself is light, since a respondent submitting a page is a handful of inserts. The load turns up later, at export and statistics time, when the application tries to hold a whole response set in memory and build a file out of it. The project's documentation says it attempts to set max_execution_time to 1200 seconds for large exports, and advises raising the memory limit to 256 MB or higher if statistics or exports fail. Our plans run 256 MB as standard, which covers the large majority of installs.
Two things bite in practice. Response tables grow one row per response and roughly one column per question, so the schema goes wide rather than deep and the database limits in the manual are real limits. Bulk invitation email is the other: it's bulk email, so it needs SPF, DKIM and DMARC on your domain, and past a few thousand messages it belongs with a transactional provider.
A managed cloud server earns its money on a live survey with tens of thousands of responses being exported repeatedly during analysis. Dedicated CPU and memory turn a failing export into a merely slow one.
Common questions we hear from people running survey software applications on 365i hosting.
Yes, actively. LimeSurvey 7 is the current stable line and requires PHP 8.1.29 or newer, with the 6.x line still maintained alongside it. Development is done by LimeSurvey GmbH in Hamburg, which also sells a hosted version, so the open-source edition is the same codebase as a commercial product rather than a side project someone maintains at weekends. That distinction matters when you are deciding whether an application will still be getting updates in three years.
Far more than any per-seat hosted plan will allow, and the limits you meet are different ones. Collection scales fine: tens of thousands of responses sit comfortably in MySQL on an ordinary plan. The pinch points are exports and statistics, which are memory-hungry, and the width of the response table, since each survey gets roughly a column per question and InnoDB tops out near a thousand columns. Long instruments want checking before activation, not after.
Often, yes, and we would rather say so than sell you hosting you do not need. For a short feedback form, an event RSVP or an internal poll, Google Forms costs nothing and takes ten minutes. LimeSurvey earns its keep when you need branching logic across many questions, quotas, randomisation, one survey in several languages, exports into SPSS or R, or a documented answer about where respondent data lives. If none of that applies, use the free tool.
Yes. It has a participant table with tokenised invitations and reminder scheduling built in. Treat it as bulk email, because that is what it is. Publish SPF and DKIM for your domain, add DMARC, and for anything past a few thousand messages point LimeSurvey's SMTP settings at a transactional provider such as Brevo, Mailgun or Postmark. Pushing several thousand invitations through a shared mail server is a reliable way to damage a domain's sending reputation.
You are the data controller and we are the processor, which is the arrangement most research governance expects to see. LimeSurvey has the controls to support it: anonymised responses that break the link back to the participant table, optional IP and referrer logging you can switch off, and a data policy checkbox before participation. UK is our default data centre location, and we will provide a UK data processing agreement on request. Retention periods and deletion remain your decisions to make and document.
Our entry web hosting plan runs a LimeSurvey install for most organisations, including reasonably large response sets. PHP version is selectable per package in the My365i control panel, memory sits at 256 MB, cron is available for scheduled tasks, and every package is backed up daily with 30 days of restore points. Move up to a managed cloud server when exports of very large response sets start timing out, or when a survey goes to a full mailing list at once and traffic spikes hard.
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All 1 survey software applications available with one-click installation on our fast UK web hosting.
