Question

I am having a problem understanding what it is I need to do to allow my Amazon EC2 instance to allow connections from outside computers. I have chosen a Windows 2008 R2 instance and have installed my ASP.NET application to it. I setup a new DB, configured IIS, and then loaded the web application on the server by going through http://localhost:80

So currently I can use RDC to connect to the EC2 server and load up my website in here under localhost, but I want to be able to go to http://(EC2 IP or DNS):80 and connect to it from outside computers.

I have no idea where to get started on this as it is the first time I’ve ever done hosting like this myself. Do I have to configure something on the Amazon EC2 control panel? Or do I have to configure something else on the web server?

I have tried pinging the public/private DNS and private IP given by Amazon but it seems it is disabled or blocked or something…

Can anyone get me pointed in the right direction on this at least?

Thanks for any help in advance!

Answer 1

There are two places you can check:

1. Windows level, check if firewall allows port 80 to listen external traffic. Opening port 80 in Windows Server 2008 R2 Or,

2. You need to check if your security group allows you to listen port 80. Click on Instances menu from left rail on EC2 console. Look for Security Group column for the instance you wanted to check Securty Group of.

   Then go to Security Groups menu, and see if port 80 is open for the whole world, (i.e. source 0.0.0.0/0). If no entry for port 80 exists in inbound. Go ahead and Add Rule for port range 80, Source 0.0.0.0/0. See the image below, where my account has port 80 open.