PHP file_get_content issue - php

Question

so I have a webservice running on a Windows machine with a static IP adress and an open port. The webservice provides some json data. When accessing the IP adress and port from the browser the json is being displayed just fine.
[Sample json data from browser:
What I want to do now is fetch the data from this machines' service with php on a website.
I have the following php code on the website:
<?php
$url = 'http://ip-of-the-machine:port/url?params';
$result = file_get_contents($url);
$json = json_decode($result);
var_dump(json_decode($result, true))
?>
When I visit the site the code is on, the page is tuck loading infinetly.
When passing 'https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/1' as the url paramter, the sample json data from this website is being displayed.
In the php.ini file allow_url_fopen is set to "true".
So I assume that there is an issue with the source of my json data on my machine where the service is running. Do you have experiance with this issue? What is the problem here?
Thank you!

Answer 1

As it turns out, there was an internal problem with the hosting provider for the website where I run the PHP script that calls the URL to fetch the JSON.
They resolved the issue and now both cURL requests and file_get_contents() work just fine. Thank you all!

Answer 2

I would suggest running this with curl rather then file_get_contents. That allows for more debugging too.
Example:
<?php
$url = 'http://ip-of-the-machine:port/url?params';
$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 0);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 10); //Tell cURL that it should only spend 10 seconds trying to connect to the URL in question.
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 30); //A given cURL operation should only take 30 seconds max.
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FILETIME, TRUE);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FRESH_CONNECT, true);
$response=curl_exec($curl);
$info = curl_getinfo($curl); //retrieve all details from the http request thas was being made
//show that information in the browser
echo '<pre>';
print_r($info);
echo '</pre>';($info);
//show the actual respones from the browser
var_dump($response);
curl_close($curl);
Output in your browser (tested with an JSON example URL from https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/) would look like this: