expose local webservice for testing

There are really only two things you will need to do.

1. Find your external IP address
2. Make sure your router and/or firewall knows its acceptable for outside people to get inside your network and that it directs the correct port to the correct internal IP.

Admittedly step two can be quite difficult (or possibly easy) and the steps to do it depend entirely on how your local network is setup (what kind of router and/or firewall you have, how they are setup, what your OS is, what ports your server is running on, what server software you are running, etc).

If you want to deal with domain names things are going to get more complicated, which is why I suggested finding your external IP address. That way you can send them to your IP address for testing.

As long as your server is only temporary you shouldn't need to worry too much about step 3, securing your server.

Hi Brandon, thanks for replying to my post!

I have a dynamic IP that gets assigned by my Internet provider, but I can hit one of the sites like whatismyip.com to get my current external IP address.  

My OS is Windows 7 Ultimate (professional edition).  I'm using a 4 port linksys wireless and Ethernet router.  Where do I expose my IP in the router settings?  I figure that is going to be the hard part?  I'm not much of a network guy and sure about what needs to be configured in the router settings.

Once I have that setup, how can I test that my web service is properly exposed over the internet for consumption?

Thanks for your help!
Regards.

To summarize, you have to tell your router to forward it's port 80 (where websites usually live) to the internal IP address of the computer the web server lives on.

I have no idea how up to date this link is, but I found this support site article from linksys. The difference would be that instead of FTP on 20 to 21 it would be web on port 80. http://kb.linksys.com/Linksys/ukp.aspx?pid=80&vw=1&articleid=3699 or perhaps this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5fUauwOuNo

Hi Brandon, sorry for delay in responding.  I've been testing and trying to get my localhost publically accessible.

So, here is what I've done and hopefully you can help me figure out what I'm missing.  

First, I have IIS setup on my Windows 7 Ultimate (Professional version) PC.  Right now, I created one site on IIS and the DefaultSite that opens the iisstart.htm page.  I modified the hosts file so I can run multiple sites at once on the same port (80) using host names.  In my hosts file I added the line: 127.0.0.1    personalwebsite.  In the IIS manager, I edited the bindings and added "personalwebsite" as the host name, port 80 and * as the IP address.  When I open a browser and type in http://localhost it will open the iisstart.htm page.  If I type in http://personalwebsite it will open my personal website that I build in VisualStudio.  All good so far.  

On my local PC the IP is 192.168.1.101 and the router IP is 192.168.1.1.  I went into the router settings under Applications & Gaming  >> Port Range Forward and entered the following:

HTTP as the Application
80 as the start PORT
80 as the end PORT
Both for the protocol
192.168.1.101 as the IP address
and selected Enable

I went to my laptop, which is connected wirelessly to my network via my Linksys router.  I opened a command console and typed in: ping 192.168.1.101 and got a successful reply.  It hits my local PC fine.

If I type in the browser window: http://localhost/ or http://personalwebsite I get page unavailable.  

What am I missing?  I'm sure this is just user error on my part.  Right now, I'm just trying to access my personal website on my laptop on my local network and then see if I can hit it over the internet.  Then I can try and setup my webservice for testing.  

Again, this is just for testing purposes only.

Thanks for your help!
Regards.

Localhost and personalwebsite are names which are only available from the server computer and will never be available anywhere else, so the laptop wouldn't be able to access it there.

192.168.1.101 is an IP address which only exists within your local network and not to the outside world. The laptop would be able to access it, but someone who isn't using your router would not.

You will need to find what your server's IP address is according to the outside world. If you (on the server computer) go to a browser and google for "what is my ip" you will be able to find the external IP address, which is the URL you would give someone from outside your network in order to access that server.

okay, so I'd put in the outside server IP for the port forwarding IP address?  

what would be the URL I'd type in to access the sites I have running locally on IIS?

No the forwarding address for the router would be telling it to forward requests from the outside world to an internal IP, which would be the 192.168.1.101. The IP you would type in to access the sites you have running would be whatever the other outside IP address is.

If my outside IP address is: 207.119.23.150 and my site name is "personalwebsite" would the url be:

http://207.119.23.150/personalwebsite   ???

I cannot seem to hit the site no matter what I try?

The following statement assumes you're using server defaults developed in IIS using a standard folder structure. Otherwise, your server settings and folder structure can determine the URL.

The default URL maps to your root wwwroot folder. The contents of that folder would be the URL http://207.119.23.150/. The URL for c:\inetpub\wwwroot\websitename\childfolder\ would be http://207.119.23.150/websitename/childfolder/

When I try and hit the site, I'm getting the error "connection has timed out".  The server at <MY EXTERNAL IP ADDRESS> is taking too long to respond.

Would that be related to a router setting or something outside of my control from my ISP?