I think this is the right forum I have a bit of a problem that I can't seem to solve, so any help appreciated. I have a static ip address that leads to my home computer (with Linux) where I host my websites. I also have a second computer (windows) which I want to be viewable from outside the network so i can host websites that need to be on a windows machine. Do I need to get a 2nd static ip address for this second computer? Or can I somehow redirect a website coming into my linux machine to my windows machine? What is the best way this handle this problem? Any help appreciated.
If your Linux machine is also on the same internal network as your Windows machine you could use the Apache mod_proxy module to setup a reverse proxy to the Windows machine. Otherwise you'll most likely need a second external static IP.
I believe you can put the PC's on a router and port forward them on your pc's internal ip address. For example I have 5 set up at home and two of them server sites and I have the same set up as you except I have dynamic ip's. I went into the router 192.168.0.1 and I forwarded my internal ip's of 192.168.0.102 and .104 to port 80 and both machines are accessible from the web.
You can't forward the same port to two different machines at the same time unless you have two external IPs. You could for example forward port 80 to server1 and port 81 to server2 though.
.That is not true because port 80 on the machine can go to whatever ip address that the router gives it. So if you have a router two machines can be port forwarded to 80.
You might want to read: What is port forwarding?. The last paragraph is the most relevent. A port can only ever be used by a single application at any one time. If your router received incomming traffic on port 80 it can only forward that to a single IP on your internal network at any one time. Unless your using different ports, your need two external IP addresses.