ESP8266 Community Forum

Hi. I just tried out this project

https://randomnerdtutorials.com/esp8266-web-server/

with the esp8266. Now where i live i have not accessed to cable internet so i used my android hot spot as a source of internet. Everything was looking fine and it was working wonderfully when i tried to connect with my mobile (the one that was feeding internet the ESP through hot spot.) Unfortunately, i have noticed that only this mobile had access to the server. I tried to connect with couple of other mobiles to the server but the page could not get loaded. Any idea why this is happening and how it can be fixed ?

Thanks

were those other devices connected to the "hot spot"?

JurajA wrote:were those other devices connected to the "hot spot"?

Yes, it is most likely for the local network. I read that i need to do something called "port forwarding" or something like that but i have no idea how to do it. Any advice?

I took a quick look at the code of your project and it was designed to work within a local network. Your phone can connect to your ESP8266 because it is a part of your local network.

If you wanna access this project from WAN (Internet), you need to do a port forward. It is a simple process but you need a router to do so. Maybe now there are apps to port forward from your mobile hotspot (I'm not up to date on mobile apps). Anyway forwarding a port means you are opening up a specific port to the whole world. It should be done carefully. There are a ton of free documentation and free YouTube tutorials on port forwarding for you to get a rough idea about how to do it safely.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Port+Forwarding

Good Luck!