Sorry for the late reply, we had a yard sale today and then company this evening so I'm just getting back to the computer. God this feels like the longest I've been offline in like a decade! Anyway I'm glad it was helpful, I literally rolled out of bed and this was the first post I read this morning so I just started typing, I was a bit worried I might have been incoherent writing so much before I even had breakfast but hey if it came across then I'm glad I helped!

Happy to see others have already stepped in to answer your questions, as with most things there are multiple solutions to your challenges but the first goal is to understand what's going on so you know the right questions to ask. Get your basic setup in place, poke around to see how it all interconnects, and you'll start understanding how other things come in to play. The bit I mentioned about being able to direct your port 80 incoming traffic without affecting your web browsing from another computer (which of course ALSO talks on port 80) really tripped me up until I realized I was overthinking things, so I just trusted that it would keep working and eventually I did find the answers.

So as I mentioned, yep there really is a lot of information to digest when you're learning how networking works, but once you get some of these basics concepts down then the rest will start coming easier. A lot of what I have learned comes from taking a single piece, playing with it a bit to get the hang of essentially what it is doing without getting so deep that I'm overwhelmed, and then moving on to the next piece to see how they interconnect. If you do that long enough you'll start coming back to the first pieces and going deeper into them. Or you'll find some pieces that you can get by only knowing the basics and you'll never need to dig any deeper. The big thing is having an overview of how things connect to each other because yeah, you're going to want to try different things with your servers. Just wait until you build your first firewall with multiple internal networks and even multiple ISP connections (my home network has five local zones plus two ISPs -- just because I can!)...