When you are using a shared hosting service for hosting your website on internet, there will be lot of restrictions to access all the features. The first thing which you will find is you are not able to SSH to the hosting server to access your website, you may also have the FTP disabled.
And above all, if you want to run some custom web server, or some software which uses non-standard ports, you will hit a wall.
This all happens because on shared hosting servers, most of the ports are blocked except 80 which is http and 443 which is https port.
So, on this kind of servers, the first thing you may need to do is to identify which all ports are open for your server where you have hosted your website and which all ports are closed.
This can be done as below,
- open website http://en.dnstools.ch/port-scan.html in browser
- on this website, type the website / IP to which you want to see ports opened
- click “Scan” and it shows the result as open / closed ports.
So, using above website, when we checked for our website.. it showed below status and as expected you can see only 80 & 443 ports are open and all other ports are closed.
What if port is closed and still you want to run the server with that port ?
On shared hosting, if this is the case that you identified the particular port is closed but you still badly need to something to run the specific software only on that port and that server…. the only things which helps is you will need to talk to the hosting service provider using their technical helpline and request them to open the port for you.
There are high chances, they will open the port unless it is too critical to not open that for their servers security.