As the author of the WWW FAQ, I regularly answer questions about the workings of the Web. If a question is frequently asked, I simply add an article to the FAQ. But sometimes a question is more detailed, more in-depth— not really a FAQ, but still of interest to others. You'll find those questions, with my answers, here in Innards along with commentary on other web-technology-related topics.

Q. First of all, thanks for all of the detailed and thorough information you provided for setting up a web site at home. I started only two days ago, and went through all of the steps smoothly. It worked (almost) perfectly...which brings me to my question: I can connect to my site from a computer outside my network just fine, but when I attempt to download larger files such as images, they are truncated with the remaining part of the image appearing as gray pixels. This only appears to be occurring on images larger than 64K. How can I prevent this from happening? Is this a setting within the web server? I've looked all over the web, but haven't found a suitable answer.

A. Well, assuming that this is happening with plain ol' image files on a plain ol' web server, and there's nothing weird going on— like generating images dynamically from PHP code or something else where you might have actual bugs on your end— then I suspect I have bad news for you. It sounds to me like your Internet Service Provider is capping the size of any file transfer from (rather than to) your Internet connection. Probably to prevent people from running servers while still allowing more trivial incoming connections.

There's a chance the 64K limit is a restriction in your own router which you can adjust. But more likely it's the policy of your ISP.

The hostility of many ISPs to the whole idea of home hosting is one more reason to consider paying under $10/month for real hosting that just works. See my article should I host my own web server? for more information about the pluses and minuses of hosting at home.

I do understand the attraction of hosting at home - it's an interesting technological experiment, and there's something very democratic and fun about it as well.

If you like, go ahead and send me a link to your home-hosted site and I'll take a look and see if I can verify exactly where and when things are going wrong.