Skype Can Prevent your Local Websites from Starting

If you run a web server on your machine and you have Skype, you might have problems with Skype preventing your web sites from starting. If you try to start them you'll get a message stating that the resource is in use... this is because Skype automatically takes over ports 80 and 443 as "alternatives for incoming connections."

In case you don't know, port 80 is the default port for http connections, and port 443 is the default for https connections. I guess this might be fine for home users but for developers, having those ports automatically taken over is horrible. To fix this problem start up Skype and go to Tools > Options > Advanced > Connection and uncheck the box next to "Use port 80 and 443 as alternatives for incoming connections."

You should now be able to start your websites.

 

Comments

The Web Design Group's Gravatar I have had loads of problems running FileZilla ftp whilst Skype is running, do they use the same port???
Jon Hartmann's Gravatar From what I can tell the default port for FTP is 21; assuming FileZilla uses the default, that shouldn't be a problem, but I can't say for certain if the ports mentioned in this post are ALL of the ports that Skype uses. It wouldn't surprise me to find that out though... it seems like the developers thought that Skype wouldn't be running alongside a web server, so I guess they wouldn't think it would be running with an ftp server either.
Comments are not allowed for this entry.
Jon Hartmann, July 2011

I'm Jon Hartmann and I'm a Javascript fanatic, UX/UI evangelist and former ColdFusion master. I blog about mysterious error messages, user interface design questions, and all things baffling and irksome about programming for the web.

Learn more about me on LinkedIn.