This is a stab in the dark but have you opened the port to receive connections from other "machines". Maybe the firewall is blocking incoming connections.
Also, it might help if you copy exactly your terminal input.
The issue was network (firewall) related. I simply
destroyed the firewall (it's on VM so am not concerned about security on this one). On ubuntu that amounted to removing the IPtable rules.
Am looking forward to putting this behind Nginx and seeing how that goes.
Thanks for sticking with me kinnard. It's very much appreciated. Have a great week.