Hosting a server on VPN connection

Question

I don't have a public ip address so I'm looking to host a server while connected to a VPN, the VPN server is running on a VPS that I own and its running SoftEther VPN server.

In my machine I connect to the VPN and then run the server app, however I check in http://www.canyouseeme.org/ to see if its successfully hosted and can be accessed from internet but its not and it shows "connection refused", if I host the server on the VPS machine it works, but I don't want that, it should be hosted on my machine and should be accessible using the ip address of the VPS/VPN.

Answer 1

You probably want to set up port forwarding on your VPN server.

When you connect to the VPN, your traffic goes through it, but you don't "become" it - the traffic directed to the VPN server (like an attempt to connect to your app) will not be forwarded to your VPN client machine - this is not the purpose of VPNs.

There is a page with port forwarding setuphere . This is to be done on the VPN server.

The alternative I use is to setup port forwarding via SSH on the application server and ditch the need for VPN. Check Remote Port Forwarding here . It works fine, encrypts your data between the application server and the gateway, but there might be bigger overhead and it may be more prone to die when the network connection is temporarily lost.