Port Forwarding Explained and Made Easy

Here is a question that I've heard many times from customers:

"I have my web server installed and running but how do I connect to it?"

The answer?

Port Forwarding. Port Forwarding is becoming more and more common with Internet Providers having customers use Broadband Modems / Routers.

Basically all Port Forwarding does is this. The connection from the client (person making the request to see your webpage for example) comes through the Internet and hits the Router. The Router then accepts the connection from the Internet IP Address, and forwards it to the correct Local IP address.



When setting up port forwarding, you must have 2 things handy. The first is the port that you are accepting the connection on, and the second is the IP address you are forwarding to. Now when doing port forwarding it is suggested that the computer on the local network has a static IP address. Likely your router is already handing out an IP address via DHCP . You can simply configure a static IP Address on that computer.

Ok. So now you know the port you are accepting the connection on, and the IP address the traffic is going to. That really is all the information you will need going into the router configuration. A great tool I suggest to customers for port forwarding questions on their specific router is portforward.com. They have a very complete list of many routers, and step by step guides for setting up the router itself for port forwarding.

Once you configure the router to pass the traffic to the computer that is hosting the traffic, thats basically it. Once you get the basics, you can easily setup multiple forwarding options to different computers, or the same computer. Just remember that you can not forward the same port twice. If you have two computers that are hosting Web Sites, you will need to accept the connection on another port. This way the router knows that connections coming in on port 80 go to computer1 and connections coming in on port 85 go to computer2.