Every time a visitor opens your site, the Internet browser sends a request to the web server, which in turn executes it and supplies the required content as a response. A simple HTML website uses minimal system resources because it's static, but database-driven platforms are more requiring and use more processing time. Every page which is served generates two forms of load - CPU load, that depends on the time the hosting server spends executing a specific script; and MySQL load, that depends on the number of database queries produced by the script while the customer browses the website. Greater load will be generated if a whole lot of people surf a particular Internet site at the same time or if many database calls are made simultaneously. Two examples are a discussion board with thousands of users or an online store in which a client enters a term inside a search box and thousands of items are searched. Having detailed data about the load which your site generates can help you boost the content or see if it's the perfect time to switch to a more powerful type of web hosting service, if the site is simply getting quite popular.
