WWW FAQs: Why can't I access my home-hosted website from my own computer?

2007-08-08: You followed the steps in my article how do I host my own website at home. And it worked— people outside your home can access your website just fine. But you can't access it by home when you connect to it by name. You see your router's administrative web pages instead. What is the problem?

When you connect to your home-hosted website by name, the name resolves to an IP address. That IP address is the address of your home router. And your home router is designed to assume that any connection to the web server port coming from inside the home is intended for the router's administration pages— even though you have carefully configured the router to forward connections on port 80 (the web server port) to your home-based web server.

Confused? Not following this material? You need to read how do I host my own website at home? first. I recommend that you also read should I host my own website at home?

Some routers are smarter than others: they can tell the difference between an attempt to connect to the "outside" address of the router and an attempt to connect to its "inside" address (usually 192.168.2.1). But some, alas, are not so smart. And with these routers, you will not be able to connect to your home-hosted website by name from within your home.

So how do you work around the problem without buing a better router? If you just need to test your home web server from one of your PCs, you can edit the hosts file on that PC so that the name of your web server automatically resolves to the internal IP address of your home web server. When your computer needs to translate a website name to an IP address, it consults the hosts file first before consulting DNS servers, so we can use this technique to avoid involving your router when your home PC connects directly to your home-hosted website.

On Windows XP, the hosts file is located here:

c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

You will need to open this file with Notepad and add one line at the end. Here I assume that your home-hosted site is called example.is-a-geek.com and that the internal IP address of your home-hosted site is 192.168.2.100, but you must use the correct name and internal IP address for your site. If you don't understand this, you should read how do I host my own website at home? before continuing.

Here's the line to add to your hosts file:

192.168.2.100 example.is-a-geek.com

"How do I edit the hosts file?" You can use Windows Notepad. Note that you will not see hosts listed when you browse to the c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc folder with Notepad. That's because the filename does not have, and must not have, a .txt extension. If you manually type in hosts after browsing to the correct folder you will be able to edit it.

After making this change, save the file and restart your computer. You will now be able to access your home-hosted website from this particular home PC. If you need access from multiple home PCs, you will need to edit their hosts files as well.

If you are running MacOS X on your home PC, you can still edit your hosts file. In your case the file is at the location: /private/etc/hosts

Linux users can find their hosts file at: /etc/hosts

If every computer, not just computers in your home, sees your router's administration pages when connecting to your website, then you have a different problem. You have checked the "allow remote administration" box in your router's administration pages. This is dangerous and prevents you from hosting a website at home. Uncheck the box.

Share |

Legal Note: yes, you may use sample HTML, Javascript, PHP and other code presented above in your own projects. You may not reproduce large portions of the text of the article without our express permission.

Got a LiveJournal account? Keep up with the latest articles in this FAQ by adding our syndicated feed to your friends list!