The real issue here is that eventually you will need to understand how networking and port forwarding works to be successful. No getting around it...
I'll try to get you started:
IP Addresses
Your home is connected to the internet through your ISP and most likely has one router/modem that is the interface between the internet (world wide) and intranet (your home). To make progress you will need to be able to log into your router/modem and have access to its configuration pages.
Technically every device in your home could have its own world wide available IP address but for a number of reasons that just isn't practical. You router/modem is the ONLY device that ends up getting assigned a publicly visible IP address. Google "what is my ip address" to see what your single address currently is.
All of your internal devices get private addresses that are reused by everyone. They are usually of the form 192.168.x.y or maybe 10.10.x.y but you need to understand that my 192.168.1.12 is not the same as your 192.168.1.12 and our internal addressing is only valid on our own networks.
Ports
The way computers talk to each other is by first identifying their IP address of the computer that is accepting connections, then secondarily identifying the sub-address (ports) withing that computer that will be accepting connection, then thirdly agreeing on what protocol they expect to chat with. For ease of use, there have been some standards that have been agreed to that the port should be usually equal to the protocol. Port 80 = web. Port 443 = secure web. Port 25 = email. etc etc etc. Of interest is that some folks think that they can 'fool' scammers by running their services on non-standard ports (ie running web on port 81 instead of 80) but that is a foolish idea because scammers can scan all ports in milliseconds to running web on non-standard will stop no one. FYI if you want to connect to web on a non-standard port you use the format http://domain.com:yy where yy is the non-standard port.
How web connections usually work...
Connect to web server at CNN by going to the web URL
http://www.cnn.com your computer looks up the IP address of "
www.cnn.com" and since we prefaced the URL with http:// then we assume we are going to use port 80. The data center at CNN is accepting incoming connections on their main firewalls on port 80 and serving up a nice pretty web page in the agreed upon protocol.
Connecting from the Internet to your Home devices...
Now let's think about your home rather than CNN... First, what domain name or IP address shall we use???? And what is your IP address???
This is always the first battle and is usually answered by using a Dynamic DNS service and a domain name assigned by that service. I think BI has some service for this but frankly I never used it and am not sure.
However you get the valid IP address of your home router, we then move to the second challenge... All incoming connections form the internet will hit your router/modem which by default... doesn't know what the heck to do with the incoming request. Your router gets a web request and barfs without setup steps.
[next step is port forwarding which is REQUIRED whether you use VPN or web forwarding or whatever. Even those who condemn port forward still area actually using port forwarding but they are forwarding to their VPN server rather than BI] I'll post a follow-up on port forwarding and VPN next.