Static IP

Generally, as long as you only plan on running a single server, you can go ahead and get a single IP address. You'd assign that IP address to the router, and set the router as a DHCP server to hand out private addresses to your local network.

In order to set up a web server, you would configure the router to forward the necessary ports to the server. For a web server, the router would forward port 80 to the internal IP address of your server. If you wanted to run an email server on the same box, you'd also forward ports 25 and 110.

The only time you should need multiple address would be if you were to plan on running multiple public servers of the same kind (2 web servers for example).

Hope this helps!

If your router supports "virtual Servers", this is pretty easy; I'm using this feature with my MultiTech RouteFinder.

The first assumption is that you are using a private IP address range inside the router. For arguments sake, we'll call it 192.168.1.x. For this to work, the servers on your private network have to have static (not DHCP) Ip addresses.

Of course, on the Internet side of the router, you have your ISP assigned static IP. With virtual servers, you tell the router to forward requests from the internet side to specific hosts on your network. For some routers, you're only allowed one server inside the network. for other, you can have more than one. For example, on my router, all requests for ports 80 & 25 go to my webserver at 192.168.1.1. Requests on ports 7777-7778 go to my game server. Requests for PC/Anywhere's ports got to my workstation.

Another thing you might look at doing is setting up dynamic DNS -- surf to http://www.dyndns.org for more information.

HTH

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