So I installed Apache web server/MySQL/myPhpAdmin on my windows machine. It's on my desktop. Everything works where if I go to http://localhost, localhost/phpinfo.php and localhost/phpmyadmin.index.php they all show up on my machine.
Now I want other users to be able to access my website, which is http://localhost/page1.php I already did port forwarding on the machine where the server is hosted and forwarded port 80 on the ip address of the local machine since I have a router.
But people can't access this website from elsewhere or even on other computers within my home network. Do I have to actually get a domain from a site like godaddy or google? Or can I just have people connect to my local machine (which has the apache web server), and host my own website on it.
I am really confused on how to actually proceed after I installed my web server and created a page in my apache root directory. Can anyone guide me on how to set this up since I don't have any real experience in this area.
Thanks!