SurveyCTO Server Management

change name to SCTO Server management

In SurveyCTO, all questionnaires and data associated with a project is uploaded to a server. Server sound technical but from the perspective of the user experience, it is nothing more complicated than opening a internet browser and logging in to your project's account on SurveyCTO's website. We will keep using the term "server" but for most purposes it can just as well be thought of as an "account".

The project team uploads questionnaire to the server

If you are working on a DIME project and you are still just developing your questionnaire, please read about DIME's development server first.

Read fist

• If you update your server, you must update the SurveyCTO Collect app on all tablets using that server

Plans

SurveyCTO offers multiple types of plans that suit different project's needs. This section described what features have made different DIME project to use different plans. For full details on the plans, see http://www.surveycto.com/plans.html.

Free Plans

There is one free plan that is an option for new users that wants to explore SurveyCTO. In return for using the free account the user needs to be an active user in the forums on SurveyCTO's website. DIME projects can instead use DIME's development server that is free of charge to the project team. Frequent reasons for a DIME project have this plan despite having access to the developemnt server is if the project wants to upload test data (which is not allowed on the development server) but cannot set up a paid server yet (project funding not dispersed yet) or do not want to set up a paid server yet (data collection is still several months away and these test submissions are very temporary).

Paid Plans

In addition to cost, the two main differences between the free plan and the paid plan is that you are not required to participate in the forums when using a paid plan, and a paid plan gives you access to contacting SurveyCTO's support.

There are three paid plans and they differ in two aspects, limits and features. All servers have limits in terms of number of questionnaires on the server, amount of data submitted to the server etc. The more a plan cost the more generous are the limits and the more features are included.

The default option for DIME's projects is to start with the cheapest paid version. The plan can be changed at any time so if you are unsure if you need a more expensive plan, you can take that decision as the need arises. Adding features is a more common reason for a DIME project to upgrade to a more expensive plan rather than increasing limits. The most common reason to upgrade to the medium plan is that the advanced sync options provides a good solution if the internet connection in the field, even relative the typical context for a DIME project, is particularly bad. The most common reason to upgrade to the most expensive plan is to get access to SurveyCTO's Data Explorer.

Keeping your server up to date

SurveyCTO regularly releases updates for the servers. These updates are not automatically pushed to all servers as one should be careful if updating a server during an ongoing survey. Each version of the survey comes with a corresponding version of the Android app SurveyCTO collect. There is a risk of the communication between the Collect app and the server will have errors if the version of the Android app does not correspond to the version of the server. Ultimately, this can lead to corrupted or lost data.

When you start a new server, you get the latest version by default. It is recommended that the server is updated between each survey round when no data collection is going on. After the server is updated, all tablets need to be updated as well. The only way to guarantee that the