Route around ISP blocking incoming port 80 [closed]

Question

My ISP blocks incoming connections to port 80, but I want to run a webserver from a home computer. I also have a domain name registered.

What are the easiest/best ways to host my site?

My only idea so far is: pay for a hosting account, set up apache there to route requests from there to my home connection on an open port (eg 8080)

Answer 1

Why pay for hosting? Couldn't you get a free hosting account somewhere, point your domain to it, and then use a simple redirect for all traffic?

I assume this is for a small website you built at home because it was convenient. Maybe a dev environment or running some scripts you want access to from anywhere. If you actually want to run a production environment from home AND your provider blocks port 80, you're crazy.

One question would be - do you want to domain name to show up when browsing the site? If not, simple redirects from domain.com to IP.ADDR.AT.HOME would work just fine (see the following link for all kinds of ways to redirect: http://www.yolinux.com/TUTORIALS/ApacheRedirect.html)

If you want your domain name to show up, here's some hacking I would do:

The big problem I see is because you're trying to redirect everything from one server to another, you're gonna have to convert POST arguments to GET (since posting to a 3rd party server which only redirects means your post data will get lost).

If your hosting provider allows some scripting language, you could use PHP or Perl to redirect all requests:

<?php
  $args = $_GET;
  $postArgs = $_POST;
  $paramString = (empty($args) ? '' : '?');
  if (empty($args)) $paramString = (empty($postArgs) ? '' : '?');
  $first = true;
  foreach ($args AS $key => $value) {
          $paramString .= (!$first ? '&' : '') . $key . '=' . $value;
          $first = false;
  }
  foreach ($postArgs AS $key => $value) {
          $paramString .= (!$first ? '&' : '') . $key . '=' . $value;
          $first = false;
  }

  $uri = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
  header("Location: http://IP.ADDR.AT.HOME:8080$uri$paramString");
?>

Really depends on what you want to do.

Answer 2

It is almost inconceivable that your ISP both permits you to run a web server and blocks port 80. If your ISP does not permit you to run a web server, then you can't run one. You are trying to find a technical solution to something that is not a technical problem. You do not have the right to run a web server.