How do I make my website public?

Question

I've made a website using IIS but it's not showing up on other devices when i visit the address. How do i do that?

Answer 1

Hi @schelp,

I've made a website using IIS but it's not showing up on other devices when i visit the address.

on other devices? If I understand correctly, what you probably want to achieve is to access a website hosted in IIS from any PC on the LAN.

If this the case, in addition to deploying the site in IIS, you also need to set up firewall rules to determine what network traffic is allowed to enter the device from the network (on the machine where you deploy your site to IIS). Simply refer to these steps below:

1. Open Start, Search for Windows Defender Firewall with Advanced Security, and press enter to open it.
2. Right click on the Inbound Rules and choose New Rule....
3. Rule Type: Choose option "Port". Click "Next>" to proceed.
4. Protocol and Ports: Enter your port number in the "specific local ports". It refers to the port number you set when deploying the IIS site. Then click "Next>" to proceed.
5. Action: Default value. Click "Next>" to proceed.
6. Profile: Default value. Click "Next>" to proceed.
7. Name: Enter some description for this setting. Finally click on the "Finish" button.

After completing the above steps, you should be able to access this site from other PCs in the form of IP:port. Such as http://192.168.xx.xx:8081/testpage.aspx

Best regards,

Xudong Peng

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Answer 2

You really need to provide some details about your network configuration in order to properly answer your question.

Are you on a home or business network? Or is your machine being hosted by a provider such as Microsoft (Azure), or Amazon (AWS)?

Are these "other devices" on your private network or are they out on the internet somewhere? Since you used the word "public", I'll assume that you want your site to be accessible from the internet.

This web site will show you the IP address that your machine accesses the internet with.

https://canyouseeme.org/

You can use it to test to see if port 80/443 is exposed to the internet.

Typically you might work with your internet service provider to reserve an IP address, get a DNS name registered, and also get a certificate so that you can use HTTPS and encrypt the network traffic.

If you are on a home network, you would need to configure port forwarding in your router to send port 80/443 requests to the pc where you host the site.