hay, please forgive my VERY late reply but ive been extreamly busy and not had the time to sit down n play with things to try and find a solution. my origional post is here: http://www.computing.net/networking/wwwboard/forum/28062.html i finally found one about 2 weeks ago but ive not had the time to get back to you guys and let you know. when i was desperatly needing access and didnt have the time to find a proper solution i used a proxy server thanks for that tip it saved my arse a few times. the router config page is where i thought the solution would be but i couldnt find the setting after an hour or so of looking i finally realised i remembered seeing the setting on one of my older routers (dur!). so after all this i eventually found a solution after reading up from a few googles on the umpteenth page i finally had another idea to try; and this one worked! it allowed me to use the site (as the cookies were coded to the site's address and prevented log in and administartion from my side); i added my ip, with the alis "mysite.no-ip.org" to my hosts file. Thus allowing me to use the url as needed and allow full access to the hosted site. thanks for your help, i dont think i would have got by without it. thanks p.s. if anyone needs any specific / more detailed instructions for this i am more then happy to help just drop me a note. Chez