When Port 80 is Blocked by ISP

I have introduced how to set up remote desktop for Windows 7 and how to set up FTP servers previously, using a service called Dynamic IP; to be more precious, I used No-Ip’s free DNS host service.  If you are careful enough, you should notice that I have to use alternate port for my FTP server because port 21 is being blocked my my ISP (Telus in Canada) like most other ISP do.

Same as port 21, port 80 is also being blocked.  If you would like to run a home-based server that you would like to make public, you will have to use an alternate port;  in my case, I used port 8888.

For example, if my Dynamic DNS domain is example.no-ip.com, and I used set up a virtual host in my router from external port 8888 to internal port 80 on my home server’s internal ip, let’s say 192.168.0.100, then I can just type in example.no-ip.com:8888 and I will be redirect to my home server.

The question is “Can we not type in the :8888 every time? All I want to do is to type in example.no-ip.com and I can visit my home web server. ” Yes, and this is what I am going to talk about today.

The answer is that we can make use of the “Port 80 Redirect” service supplied by Dynamic DNS provider.

Since I used No-Ip as my dynamic DNS service provider, my post will be using it as an example, but other providers should have the same feature — you just need to fine them out.

When you log into your account in no-ip,click the “Hosts/Redirects” tab in the menu:

Then click choose the SLD (Second Level Domain) in your No-Ip account:

Instead of choosing “DNS Host (A)“, we choose “Port 80 Redirect“, and the port is the service port on your home web server.  For example, I filled in 8181, but for our above example, we should fill in 8888.

It will take a couple of minutes before the change take effect.  Now you can just type in example.no-ip.org, and you will visit the home web server without typing the alternate port in the URL.

Post Note:

Using this method, you don’t have to type the alternate port every time you key in your home web server’s URL (The dynamic second-level domain from No-Ip), but the downside is that you can only use it for web server.

If you just use the dynamic DNS as “DNS Hosts (A)”, you can use example.no-ip.org:8888 for web server and example.no-ip.org:2222 for FTP server; but using the dynamic DNS as “Port 80 Redirect” can only forward this subdomain from no-ip to your web server port.