The rate in which a web server can deliver your pages to a viewer, or how fast your site loads, is based on the actual speed of the processor, how complex the request is, how many simultaneous requests the server is providing, and the connection speed between the server and the viewer’s web browser.
Each request made to a server is known as a ‘hit’; this is an over-generalized term that will do little to explain the visitor base of your web site or the performance of the server itself. For example, if you have a web page with four images and a visitor accesses that page, five hits will be generated; one for each image and one for the actual HTML page. These combined ‘hits’ could actually be less intensive than a complex database search. Only one hit would be generated, in this search, when you access the complete profile summary for each of your 2,000 customers, because you load only one page. Every hit, every bit of data that travels to and from your web site, accounts for the most sought after Internet resource: bandwidth.
