As used in reference to the World Wide Web, Hit means a single request from a web browser for a single item from a web server; thus in order for a web browser to display a page that contains 3 graphics, 4 hits would occur at the server: for the HTML page and one for each of the 3 graphics. Hits are often used as a very rough measure of load on a server, e.g. "Our server has been getting 300,000 hits per month." Because each hit can represent anything from a request for a tiny document (or even a request for a missing document) to a request that requires some significant additional processing (such as a complex search request), the actual load on a machine from 1 hit is almost impossible to define.
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