General website publishing questions involving domain forwarding issue

Question

Even though I have been having a certain level of knowledge and experience about web development I have never interested in obtaining a domain and publishing a website from my own server. Since today I have been struggling with getting my own domain and configuring it utilizing web sources. I started with learning the outline of web publishing process including web server installation, deploying a website for testing purpose,router port forwarding, getting a domain and forwarding domain to my router which will also forward http requests to my web server

I am confused about some parts and so far could not get the web site accessed from outside of the network. All I try to do is just for learning purpose so I do not pay much attention to security issues for now. I have Server 2008 and IIS 7.5 installed. I use a laptop and have access to the modem over wireless and my modem is Zoom x6 5590.

Well I will continue explaining what I have done so far and what I think will be after each action I did, I have successfully had access to my website on any local computer entering the internal ip address and port pair of the host machine in a browser. Next, I forwarded port 80 of my host machine creating a virtual server like 10.0.0.x(internal ip(static) of the host) - TCP - start port : 80 - end port : 80 in router options. Now I suppose every request that will come to the public IP on port 80 will be forwarded to my host machine(10.0.0.x) over port 80. So If everything went as desired, the website listening on port 80 will accept the request and process the issue and finally respond bla bla bla... I suppose to access my website from outside of the network by entering http://MyPublicIp:80 in a browser but I couldn't accomplish this task by now despite using Godaddy's domain forwarding tool,I see a small view of my website when I click the "preview" button that checks whether the address(http://publicip/Index.aspx) I entered where my domain will be forwarded is available or not. I am sure that configuring domain does not play a role in solving such a problem since using public ip and port matching does not help. So here is the first question, What is the fact that I face this problem? After that, I have couple of question regarding domain forwarding using Godaddy tool. Can I forward my domain to a any port for example port 8080 other than default HTTP port 80? Additionally, can I use a sub-domain to forward to a different port of the host? What I want to design is if the client enters www.mydomain.com, website1 will respond over a specified port and after when a client enters info.mydomain.com, another website which listens on different port will respond. I tried to add a sub-domain and forward it to a address like http://www.mydomain.com:8080/Index.aspx with no success. Can I really do that? Finally, what if I have a ftp site listening on the default port 21 and I create a domain like ftp.mydomain.com that will forward to that ftp site address. Is it possible to use sub-domains for ftp site access?

I know I am more than confused but no matter whatever and however you reply to me, you will help me have a more clear view on this subject. Thank you very much from now.

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To be more clear, I have already had an application that is actively listening on port 8080 and furthermore I have configured my router to forward any incoming request on port 8080 to my server ip and port point. Unfortunately unlike doing the same for port 80, I resulted in no action. Perhaps you know when you forward your domain name to your host ip - port - uri location using Godaddy tool, you have the chance to see what page actually a domain will forward. So no preview was shown as a result. Again, a program listening on port 80 and incoming request for port 80 is being forwarded on router successfully and when I configure my domain to forward that location I see the small preview which will prove that it works. But applying same thing for port 8080 shows no preview which I think something causes fail for it to work.

Questions

1 - When I want to forward domain to specific location, I get only HTTP/HTTPS protocols available. Does that mean that I cannot forward any sub-domain to a ftp application? If not so how?

2 - There are actually two things that confuse me.

A - Even though I have configured everything as far as I know to access a web page,
still no access from outside of the network.I have neither virus program installed nor windows firewall open for testing purpose. The steps I have taken;

• On IIS 7.5, created a website listening on port 80 and a web page called Index.aspx located at the root of the web site.
• Router is configured to forward any incoming request through port 80 to my local computer(has static Ip) where the web server is running.
• have register a domain and forwarded that domain to http://mypublicIp:80/Index.aspx.

• The result is when I click the preview button on Godaddy tool for forwarding the domain, I truly see the page where the domain points in a small preview screen but when I try to access it from a computer on the internet, nothing happens.

  B - When I publish the same web site on port 8080 and have the other configurations done, on Godaddy tool, I write http://mypublicIp:8080/Index.aspx, I get no preview of the web page. I did actually the same but no luck.

Answer 1

1. Domain forwarding and the port you're trying to access have quite a little in common. While DNS servers are supposed to propagate you domain name, your DNS provider must point the requests to the IP address of the server your site is hosted at; IIS/Apache/other server should actually listen to a port supplied in request.

2. Yes, you can forward subdomain to specific listened port. Please refer to specific server configuration manuals for details (IIS; Apache)

3. All the http requests (via Http 1.0 or 1.1 protocols) are captured by http handler of web server (HTTP.SYS for IIS for example); all ftp requests are captured by ftp handler, hence you can freely use subdomains for ftp access.