Advanced Poll Hosting: Compare Hosting

What is Advanced Poll?

Advanced Poll is a free script that can be easily installed to add a powerful polling tool to your website. Despite the fact that it’s simple and free Advanced Poll offers many desirable features such as:

• Ability to host multiple simultaneous polls.
• Pre-installed templates and virtually unlimited poll options.
• Support for multiple languages.
• IP-logging and IP-locking to protect poll integrity.
• Cookie support.
• A comments feature.
• A vote expiration feature.
• Support for randomized polls.
• Support for MySQL and PostgreSQL databases.

In short, Advanced Poll is a great free tool for designing and posting polls and then keeping track of the responses.

What is Advanced Poll used for?

Part of managing a successful online presence for your business is collecting and managing customer feedback, and one of the best tools for doing so is the poll. Adding a polling feature to your site can help you find out not only who your customers are—age, income, education, profession—but what they like and dislike about your products and services. Such information is a goldmine for the savvy marketer, and one of the most popular applications for collecting it is Advanced Poll.

What is unique about Advanced Poll?

Designed to work with the popular MySQL version of the Structured Query Language (SQL) database management software, Advanced Poll lets you set up polls on your site and begin collecting responses within minutes. You can customize the design, questions, language, response methods, and user tracking information (e.g., IP tracking, cookies, etc.) as well as the display format of the poll results (e.g., pie charts, bar charts, line charts, etc.). Each poll can be set to expire after a given time or run indefinitely. You can also add a customer response area to collect user comments, and you can even run multiple polls simultaneously.

All the information collected from your polls (including both user responses and user information collected by cookies and IP tracker) will be stored in either a MySQL database or a text file for easy retrieval and analysis. Most hosts support MySQL natively, but check with your host for details on the limit (if any) of SQL databases in your hosting plan.

Why choose Advanced Poll?

Advanced Poll is a great choice for at least three reasons:

• It’s free. Advanced Poll is available as a free download with simple installation.
• It’s powerful and offers many options and features that will allow you to customize polls to meet your specific information needs.
• It’s simple to install and use, especially when offered as a one-click installation by your hosting provider.

What are some alternatives to Advanced Poll?

If you’re looking for a poll script similar to Advanced Poll you might consider LimeSurvey or Little Poll. LimeSurvey is a poll and survey script that is free and offers many polling options and features. LimeSurvey offers greater functionality than Advanced Poll in that it also supports surveys with text inputs. Little Poll is a simpler solution than Advanced Poll. It offers simple polls with limited options and features.

If your website is run by a Content Management System (CMS) you might also consider plugins designed specifically for your CMS. The most popular CMS options such as Joomla, WordPress, and Drupal all offer several poll plugins. A quick search for poll plugins should help you find several options. If your site does make use of a CMS it may be easier to use a CMS-specific poll plugin than to try integrate Advanced Poll.

How do I install Advanced Poll?

Some hosting providers offer one-click installation of Advanced Poll. If your hosting provider offers one-click installation of Advanced Poll it will be easier to take advantage of that option than to manually install the program.

If your hosting provider does not offer one-click installation of Advanced Poll you can still install the program manually. First, Advanced Poll should be downloaded from the developer proxy2.de. Prior to installation, you will need to create a database on the server where Advanced Poll can store poll responses. You will need to know the database name, host location, username, and password.

After downloading the installation files and unzipping the folder upload all of the files and folders to the subfolder where you would like to host the script. A ReadMe file is provided with installation instructions.

Note that the downloaded zipped folder is provided in a .tar.gz format. You may need to download a special utility program to unzip this type of folder. A free open-source option to unpack .tar.gz folders is 7-zip.

A ReadMe file is provided in the installation files. Instructions for installation and configuration of database settings as provided in that file should be followed to complete installation.

Advanced Poll Pros and Cons

Pros: Advanced Poll is simple to use and offers a wide range of options and features. If you’re looking for a robust polling option, and don’t need the ability to accept survey-type text input Advanced Poll is a great option.

Cons: If your hosting provider does not offer one-click installation manual installation of Advanced Poll does require some technical know-how. You will have to manually create a database, download and unzip the installation files, upload the installation files to the appropriate subfolder on your domain, and then follow the installation procedures in the included ReadMe file.

Also, Advanced Poll only accepts poll answers and doesn’t accept text input. So if you want to accept both poll and survey type input you’ll need to use something else such as Lime Survey.

Server Requirements

Advanced Poll is compatible with both Windows-based and Linux-based servers that support the PHP Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) framework. The software itself is free, but be sure to check with your host to ensure you have the latest versions of MySQL (or equivalent) and PHP before installing or deploying it on your server.