Sorry, if anyone can think of a better title please change it!

I want to host my own websites from home. For testing purposes, I have a virtual machine running a trial version of Windows Server 2008 Enterprise.

Note I currently run a VPS and host my own websites but due to a nice speed upgrade on our line I now want to host from home.

I have several domains but I wanted to test with one, that is rickyoleary.com.

Our ISP does not provide static IP addresses unless we have a business account so I've been looking at no-ip.com. I admit my networking isn't the best, hence this question but I've been bashing my head all day on this one.

I created a host name, muffinbubble.no-ip.org which runs on IP: 86.148.124.15.

I've setup IIS on the server with a simple test page. I've then forwarded port 80 traffic from the router and from what I can see, it's working. If I access my website (I was unable to link to this for some reason so please copy and paste this) - http://86.148.124.15/ - I see my test page.

So the next step was to create my nameservers. This domain is with namecheap.com so I created my nameservers, ns1.rickyoleary.com and ns2.rickyoleary.com. Both these point to the same IP (and yes, that will be changed after testing), the same IP as above: 86.148.124.15.

On the server itself I have set up DNS entries as below which I believe to be correct and added rickyoleary.com and www.rickyoleary.com in the host headers (or bindings) in IIS 7.0.

If I try and look up my domain, rickyoleary.com it shows ns1.rickyoleary.com and ns2.rickyoleary.com as the nameservers.

I then tried to use just-ping.com on my nameserver ns1.rickyoleary.com. I get 100% packets lost, but the correct IP address is returned (I'm guessing the router does not allow pings, but is still accessible...).

I get no response when pinging rickyoleary.com.

Here's the problems:

1. I cannot ping ns1.rickyoleary.com or ns2.rickyoleary.com from a command prompt. I'm not sure if this is an issue.
2. When I added the nameservers in Windows Server 2008 and clicked 'resolve' a message box displays stating "No such host is known".
3. I cannot ping rickyoleary.com.
4. rickyoleary.com is not showing my test page on my server.

Now - please note, I've waited around 6 hours for propagation. From my experience, although you're told to wait 24 - 48 hours, the changes are normally pretty quick so perhaps I'm being impatient or naive to think it should all be working fine until then.

I would really appreciate some help here.

Thanks.