Yes. Your subscription will fall back to the FREE plan after the paid period is over (assumg that you cancelled it). Please note that some features (such as domain aliasing) are only available with a paid subscription.
Yes. At the end of each subscription period your response volume is reset.
For example, the BASIC package will set your response volume to 1000 at the end of your month period.
No. Only after the paid subscription period has ended will your subscription fall back to the FREE package, which will set your account to 25 responses.
We are sorry, but the prepaid packages are not available anymore and will also not return in the future.
We're sorry, but we cannot give discounts for purchases in the past.
In short...
A response is counted if a participant completes your survey once, regardless of how many questions or question groups your survey contains.
In a more detailed description...
- A survey is taken and completed => 1 response
- A survey is taken and only half completed => 0.5 response
- A dataset is manually added by an administrator => 1 response
- A partially completed survey is marked as finished by an administrator => 0.5 response
There are no locked features in LimeSurvey except for the response and upload limit. Some additional services (like domain aliasing) are only available with the paid subscription plans.
At first, we will send you a warning by email that your response volume is getting low - you can set this warning limit in your account settings after registering.
Please make sure your email address is always correct.
If your available Survey Response balance hits below zero your participants won't be able to answer your survey(s) anymore and we will send another email to you.
If you are using the FREE plan, then your access to LimeSurvey will be locked completely. In that case, you will have to wait until the end of your month period for it to get unlocked automatically or buy a subscription plan.
Survey participants might be sceptical or careful due to the LimeSurvey Professional url in the address bar, e.g. following a click on a survey link from your website/invitation email, the url changes to ‘yourdomain.limequery.com’.
Domain aliasing allows you to use your own website domain for your survey.
Example:
Your regular website is http://www.mydomain.com. Your LimeService installation is at http://mydomain.limequery.com. . By using domain aliasing you can e.g. use http://survey.mydomain.com for the LimeSurvey installation so that your participants only get to see this domain in their address bar.
Domain aliasing is only available as part of the EXPERT or ENTERPRISE subscription.
This is how it works:
- Open the administration panel of your domain/hosting provider where you host mydomain.com and search for the DNS settings. Change or create a DNS ‘A’ entry for your preferred domain name (for example ‘survey.mydomain.com’) and have it connect to the IP address of your LimeService installation. You can find out the IP address by opening a console window and typing 'ping yoursubdomain.limequery.com'.
- Edit your LimeSurvey Professional settings and add your preferred domain name (without http://), for example ‘survey.mydomain.com’
- SSL & alias domains: If you use an alias domain, our system will try to automatically create an SSL key using Let's Encrypt. Note that this only works if the DNS entry is properly set (see step 1). Every time you save the alias domain URL in your LimeSurvey Professional profile settings our system will try again to retrieve a key from Let's Encrypt.
- Alias URL in invitation/reminder emails: To fully use the new alias domain URL for your invitation/reminder emails just log in at the administration URL of the alias domain domain, e.g. http://yoursubdomain.limequery.com/admin
Caution:
- It is not possible to set an alias to specific subpages/paths (such as http://www.mydomain.com/test/test.html), only full domain names are allowed. In most cases a subdomain is the best choice, but root domains are also okay.
In case you have any further questions, don’t hesitate to use our support system.
We are trying our best to keep your installation available at all times and guarantee a 99% uptime. If there is a reason to temporarily shut down the survey facilities, we will let you know in advance either by email (for a scheduled maintenance) or on the LimeSurvey.org homepage (for emergency maintenance).
Yes. Generally, that is possible without any problems. There is one important thing though: You can't import files from a version newer than the version LimeSurvey is using, but usually, LimeSurvey Professional always offers the latest stable version. Currently, you can import surveys from any LimeSurvey version 1.91+ or newer. Note that you can download any past LimeSurvey version from the LimeSurvey download area.
When sending invitiations or reminders for your survey you have two choices:
1.) Using our mail server
If you are using the LimeSurvey Professional mail server, all your emails will have the sender address noreply@limesurvey.org. However, these emails will have a Reply-to header with your email address. So in case someone tries to reply they will write to you directly.
Although this method is set up very quickly (just enter global settings and set 'LimeSurvey' as your preferred mail type) it has one downside: If an email cannot be transmitted to the email receiver and bounces back, then you won't get any notifications whatsoever.
Please don't abuse LimeSurvey for spam or we will have to lock your account. Make sure that you have the general consent of people you want to send invitations to.
2.) Using your own SMTP server
This method has the advantage that you can send all email invitations and reminders using your own sender address and you will get bounced emails back. Most email and hosting providers offer SMTP to send emails. The only thing for you to find out is how to send an email via that SMTP - by figuring out the following details:
- Email address (which is allowed to send using that server)
- SMTP user name (in many cases this is the same as the email address)
- SMTP host name
- Password
- Does your SMTP require an SSL or TLS connection? If yes, also find out which port it is.
Then enter the global settings dialog in your LimeSurvey installation and go to the email tab - enter the required data. If your SMTP server is using a special port, then attach it to the host name with a colon. For example, if your host name is 'smtp.server.net' and the port is 143, then write 'smtp.server.net:143' as host name. For security reasons we currently only allow the following ports numbers: 110, 143, 587, 993 and 995.
After you save the new settings make sure that you enter that same valid email address in the survey settings of your survey.
Now it should all be running fine.
A note to email server administrators:
LimeSurvey will initialize the SMTP connection from the IP address of your LimeSurvey installation. Just ping the URL of the LimeSurvey installation to find out which one it is. In case you have your SMTP server locked down you will need to add this IP address as an exception to your SMTP configuration/firewall.
In the top-right corner of the admin interface you can see how much storage you are using and how much your maximum storage limit is.
Every file you or your participants upload to the installation (like pictures, documents or possibly videos) is included here.
If you exceed the storage limit, all surveys which contains file upload question types will be locked and you will not be able to upload further files in the administration.
If you delete responses and surveys, the space occupied by those items will be freed. If you want to keep the uploaded files, please observe that they will not be included in an exported survey archive file (*.lsa)!
You have to manually go to response browsing and select files you want to download. See picture.
When you've saved all the files you want to keep, you can start to remove files. Uploaded files will be deleted together with a response, but it's also possible to delete the files without deleting the response by clicking on the button with the red paper clip.
To delete multiple files at once, check the responses which files you want to delete and then click the red paper clip icon in the massive action menu.
Templates and label sets are deleted in the template editor and label sets manager, respectively.
After you've deleted data, make sure to go to global settings, the storage tab, and click on "Calculate storage" to update your storage counter.
When your storage exceeds the allowed limit of your subscription package, all surveys which contain upload question types will be blocked.
Also you will not be able to upload files for your survey content anymore.
To unlock these surveys/unblock the file contact you have to free up space by deleting old surveys (having file upload questions) and/or their responses.
Storage reminder percentage is a setting in your installation profile.
This setting controls when your storage alert e-mail will be sent out. As an example, say you enter the value 10 (10%, default value) and have 100 MB total storage (Basic package). When your used storage reaches 90 MB (10% space left), an e-mail will be sent out to the administrator of the installation. If you entered the value 50, the warning would be send out when half of your storage is used, and so on.
See the other FAQ items about storage for more information about which actions to take when your storage reaches its limit.
If you go to global setting, there's a storage tab:
Click on the button "Calculate storage" and the page will show you how much space your surveys, templates and labels take up:
After you've deleted data, make sure to go to global settings, the storage tab, and click on "Calculate storage" to update your storage counter. It might take a few seconds to come into effect. Just reload the page to see the new storage count.
If you just would like to delete your LimeSurvey Professiona installation please follow these steps:
- Navigate to your profile page to see an overview of all you installations.
- Click the 'Edit' button.
- On the bottom of that next page there is a big red button 'Delete now'. Click on it, read the warning and its implcation and confirm the deletion.
Please note that on deleting an installation any existing subcription will be cancelled and cannot be used anymore.
All data provided by your or your participants inside that LimeSurvey installation will be lost.