I have an "always-on" 512kbps broadband connection to the Internet. I want to host my own content online, so I downloaded a small web server program. It's working on port 80, since when I type http://localhost in my web browser I get index.html (a page I made). I went o whatismyipaddress.com and it gave me 82.37.129.163. Then I went and registered at no-ip.com and made the DNS domain jhg.no-ip.com. However, with whatever web browser I use (IE, Firefox Opera etc.) I get page not found errors. What am I doing wrong?

Thanks in advance.

Did you download the client, and register the hostnames as required, then run the DNS updater? Also, have you tried checking your presence from a different location, as I *think* you may have a problem with trying to loop back on yourself.

Are you using a router or a firewall? If so, you'll need to open up port 80. See if the ip you have from start-run-ipconfig is the same as the one you have in whatismyip.com.
-SN

your ISP may also block any incoming connection on port 80

cerj.

I did a ping of jhg.no-ip.com through two different ISP's and both resolved to 82.37.129.163 IP address, so the register and DSN's are doing their thing for you.

However the pings of 82.37.129.163 got no response from your system? One ISP got no response (normal for that ISP) and the others servers gave a "Destination not reachable" error.

So either your ISP TELEWEST is blocking such requests, you got the wrong IP address, there is a firewall in place, or your system was down.

I'm asking myself something here, and admit servers isn't my thing. However, Telewest uses a contention ratio of either 40:1 or 50:1 for each IP issued. So could that be a cause of the problem, that it cannot resolve the exact machine it is trying to reach? I'm guessing Telewest set up their service differently than a web host would, since they expect the share to be used by clients, not servers?

You are behind NAT (network address translation), similar to a firewall. The ISP could still forward port 80 to your machine.
When you've configured the webserver to bind to the public IP and netstat -ta shows that a process bound to the port 80 it works, or it SHOULD'VE worked.

If this doesn't work allready there's a better alternative, and still cheap:
http://www.budgetdedicated.com/
It's a dedicated Linux system with full (and real) root access running 2.6.4 kernel already!

Visit www.budgetdedicated.com for 9$/mo. DEDICATED servers!

Thank you everyone for your replies, I am using all of the tips you gave to try to host from my machine. However, I will be looking at ErikLowVoice's recommendation.

Thanks again!

I'm curious, if you have XP Pro why did you download a webserver when it comes with IIS?

Sord,

A few reasons really:

1. I dislike using Microsoft software, mainly because of all the bugs. I would be worried that it would get "hacked" or something...

2. I just really quickly wanted to test out my dynamic DNS domain that I registered. The web server I downloaded was absolutely tiny (less than 100K) and basically allowed me to serve static HTML pages and that's it.

3. This was just for a quick test. If I ever get it to work, I will be using Apache because I've used it before and it is flexible and secure.

;-)

Plus, IIS takes up valuable hard disk space, especially when I have a small hard disk (8GB).