: Issues with web hosting at home I want to host a small personal website at home. One basic problem I am hitting is, From inside home network, I cannot access my domain name. I have to use

@XinRu657

I am hosting a website on one of my home pc's using a dynamic dns service as well. All I did was:


Forward external requests on port 80 to the pc hosting the site in the router setup. For example (wan ip:80) --> 192.168.1.1:80.
Open port 80 in windows firewall on the server pc.

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@Odierno851

On the computer you are using to access your server (not on the server itself) add a line to its hosts file like:

192.168.1.4 example.com

Depending on your OS, the hosts file can be found in a number of locations. Use the table on Wikipedia to track it down.

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@Vandalay111

If you don't want to play with hosts file, Split DNS is the solution.

The easiest way is to install Dnsmasq on your local server and reconfigure DHCP on your router to to use it as DNS server.

Dnsmasq should forward queries to send queries to your name servers, then study configuration file how to override DNS records.

wiki.zimbra.com/wiki/Split_DNS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-horizon_DNS serverfault.com/questions/18748/overriding-some-dns-entries-in-bind-for-internal-networks

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@Lee4591628

Disable remote management in your router settings, or move it to a different port (such as 8080)

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@Merenda212

Its to do with the way port forwarding works differently inside and outside the your network. the router routes correctly from outside the network (WAN) to the selected LAN IP.

I would suggest using a service such as megaproxy in order to test your site from a virtual external location.

Personally i use a NO-NAT connection, which gives me 8x full external internet IP addresses that i can assign to devices, such as web severs and VIOP access boxes.
i then have another router running NAT to create an internal network and protect my PC, laptops etc inside the local LAN.

I use ENTA.net for this - very good UK based service, decent price (but a bit more than generic cheap-o home adsl, though not much)
and their service is designed for doing this too, so you are well within their usage policies.

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@Martha676

Alternative Solution:

Out of personal experience, I would choose No-IP to direct your domain to your server.

No-IP's Plus package is something that I have used to eliminate the problem that you are encountering. I read that you are using Dyn's DNS service -- if that cannot be changed, I understand. No-IP's service is much easier for the average person to implement as a domain.com to server solution.

If you should use this method, be sure to remove all of your information from the Dyn DNS service to make sure that Dyn DNS is not trying to manage your server and domain at the same time.

You should be able to solve all of your issues using this service. Here is a link: No-IP Plus

Check with your ISP to make sure you are not in violation of your User Agreement and their Terms of Service by self-hosting your domain!

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@Phylliss660

On your computer inside your router setup an entry in your hosts file to point to your server's internal ip address. This means that it overrides the DNS entry from the public internet.

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@Pierce454

According to ref 1, ref 2, port forwarding only works from an external network. Just use the local IP for testing purposes. There's nothing wrong with your configuration; it's just the way port forwarding is designed.

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@Pope3001725

I hope I understand what you meant;

your dyndns service points to your external ip (1.2.3.4 as example), you need to configure Port forwarding on your router.

Maybe your Webserver needs an alias for example.dyndns.org?

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