Djulian wrote: I understand that even if you are good guys it would be counter productive for you to advise a hosting company other than limesurvey 
No, not really. Because as you can see from my forum signature, I am not member of Limesurvey GmbH, the guys behind the Limesurvey Pro offer. I am a volunteer here in the forum and I am doing this on my spare time. I am not earning money with this and I am not getting any comission for recommending LimesurveyPro.
In my job I use survey tools as well, but generally not Limesurvey. We use survey systems that cost several thousand Euros per year. So why am I doing all this? Because I was a student as well and when I wrote my theses I would have been more than happy to have something like Limesurvey at my hand. But back then either LS did not exist or I didn't know about it.
So today I find it great that there is an open source survey tool with all these features, that you can download for free. Yes, you have to pay for the hosting, but generally this is nothing too expensive.
So I support the project by moderating the forum, giving help to others through the forum, help translating, creating bug reports, etc.
But as nice as you can be, I'm a student which means I don't have much money as you can guess.
I totally get it. As I said, I was once a student too. But let's be honest, as a student we sometimes spent money on stuff that could be invested a lot better.
And this seems to be for your thesis or something, so investing a few bucks in your future would be probably a good idea, to get the best results.
Now having the free pack limit the responses to 25 participants which isn't great so I'm kind of stuck :') The pro version seems to be a good option (you defend it pretty well btw), but there are several kinds that can be very expensive for me and you didn't mention which one would be suitable for my issue... The only one I could afford would be the basic one, for one month, is this pack offering a hosting ? I mean if I take it, I won't have to rent a web server, find a hosting company or anything ?
Well, as I don't know what your requirements are, I can't tell you what you need. We know very little about your project.
Yes, 25 participants is quite low. But the free version is probably not meant for production use, but rather for potential clients to test the offer and then decide if it is for them or not. At the end of the day the guys from the Limesurvey GmbH are doing this for a living.
If you do not need more than 1000 responses per month (1000 questionnaires completed by respondents) and not more than 250MB of files to upload, the Basic one is good enough.
I don't find it particulary expensive, for me it says it costs R$ 89 or roughly 22 Euros. So in most countries in the EU this is probably the value of 4-6 drinks when you go out at night. This is 1-2 drinks less per Saturday during 4 weeks. Going with the Limesurvey PRO hosting is the easy solution, if you don't want to spend much time and don't want to worry about anything.
But there is also another option, hosting it on your own webspace, as Joffm mentioned as well. However, watch out with that offer that Joffm mentioned, the 0,99 Euro per month seem to be only if you go for the 12 months (not very good in french). But you can see that getting a server to host your survey is not all that expensive, if your project is not huge. But we can't tell, because we know nothing about it (how many participants, how long is the questionnaire, how many respondents at a time would you expect, etc).
I host my website for about 8 Euros at allinkl.com and this handles Limesurvey just fine. If you don't have many respondents, you can probably also go with a smaller package, but it has to have PHP and MySQL.
My normal Limesurvey installation runs on a managed VPS which costs about $ 25,00, so that is quite a bit more expensive, but will also be able to hold higher loads and gives you more freedom. But I think it would be overkill for you.
Just find yourself a half decent hosting company and install Limesurvey on this.
So if you are willing to invest some of your time and brain, as Joffm said, you will be able to get Limesurvey up and running in no time and the cost should be more than reasonable. You don't have to spend more than 5-10 Euros per month for hosting, if at all. 2-3 beer less, remember?
Now it is up to you. You could also try to go with one of those free hosters out there, but I honestly wouldn't recommend it, because you generally get what you pay for and they are generally not very reliable and often have ridiculous limitations.
You don't want to loose respondents. Someone that is halfway into filling in the questionnaire when it breaks down will most probably not start over again, especially as I assume that they will not get rewarded for doing it.
Installing Limesurvey has become pretty easy with the web installer that guides you through the process. But if you are doing the installation of a web application for the first time, you might have to read a little bit in the manual and the forum here.
But in general, the installation can be done in about 5-10minutes, including the download of the Limesurvey zip file and the upload to the server.
So in case of the self hosting Limesurvey is completely free for you (as long as you don't want to use the ComfortUpdate feature, which you would have to pay for, but you can always update manually, investing a bit more of your time), you only would pay the hosting company for providing you with the necessary webspace.
If you run into problems, the forum here usually giving quick response if you explain your problem well.
By the way: You CAN get a webserver for free from Limesurvey. Actually you already seem to have it. The Limesurvey Xampp package comes with the webserver already and you can install it on your computer. But this is meant for testing and development purposes, and not for production. You don't want your personal computer as the production server, because you don't want your computer to be accessible from the internet for everyone.
