Most of you guys would have seen a downtime on your websites for many different reasons but generally the most common reason is high server load. This would happen :
When there are a huge number of visitors on some website hosted on the server.
When there is a bad script used on a website which runs numerous SQL queries.
When some website on the server is on the homepage of social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg, propellor, slashdot etc
When some website owner starts sending huge number of emails and most of them bounce back.
When the server’s antivirus is running & scanning the whole hard disk.

There are a lot more reasons due to which a server would generally run on a high load and we need to make sure its always up & running. There is no need to check your bandwidth speed when your websites are not loading quickly because the reason would be a high load on the server where your website is hosted. Lets find how to check out the server load.

Go to Cpanel of your website & on the left menu section go towards the footer part. The first thing you will find is the general server config with the hosting package you have purchased, php version , mysql version, the operating system of your server, shared ip address of your website, Kernel version & Cpanel pro version. This information can help you out in case you are looking for the version of php or mysql on the server for installing some scripts. Now the last link would be Service Status Click to View Click on the same and you will be redirected to a page with some real time stats of the server load.

The 3rd point which is Server load is very important and it should be green, though a server load equal to available CPU is ok and there wont be any problem, but if it exceeds then the problems get started. If you check out it says 8CPU’s which means this server has got 4Gb of Ram which is quite huge and can handle a lot of queries at the same time and if you check the above screenshot towards the lower end you can find that the server has also got backup hard drives which are another reasons for making the servers on high load since its keeps updating with the change in data in the main hard disk drive.

Hope this quick tutorial would help you out in finding the server load at times you feel some websites not loading or your own website not loading. if you find that the Server Load 0.23 (8 cpus) section is showing stats something like Server Load 8.0+ (8 cpus) then its time to contact your hosting companie’s support team and get more information for the reasons on it and make sure its handled asap rather than expecting a downtime.