When you say "I proceed to port forward", can you describe what you are doing and on what device? Your router needs to have port forwarding set on it, so you forward a specific port to the internal IP of your server (open cmd prompt on your server and type 'ip config' and it will give you the internal IP, usually starting 192.168). If you want this external connection to work more than just the one time, then make sure the server has a reserved IP on your router too.
When you say "I proceed to port forward", can you describe what you are doing and on what device? Your router needs to have port forwarding set on it, so you forward a specific port to the internal IP of your server (open cmd prompt on your server and type 'ip config' and it will give you the internal IP, usually starting 192.168). If you want this external connection to work more than just the one time, then make sure the server has a reserved IP on your router too.