So you can see your website from your office, but when you get home to work on it, you can’t see it when you type in:

http://myhost.bounceme.net.

This is a common problem with even the most popular routers on the market today. The problem occurs when you request your No-IP hostname from behind your router. Some routers know how to loop the request back into your machine, others do not. There are two ways to remedy this, first get the latest firmware for your router to see if this issue has already been fixed. If that does not work or you do not feel comfortable doing this, you can just edit your hosts file on your computer on the local network.

By modifying the hosts file you can take the router out of the equation and call your site locally by name. You can do this by adding a line to your hosts file. On Unix/Linux you can find this file in the “/etc/” directory. In Windows, look in the Windows or WINNT directory under System32driversetc. Just add your local IP address followed by the host and domain name of your web server.

For example, I would add a new line with:

127.0.0.1 myhost.bounceme.net

Save the file, open your browser and type in the name you just entered. Your site should come right up.

With this setup, it would be wise to verify your port forwarding setup from time to time. You can do this by visiting www.portchecktool.com and use its port checking tools.