Sometimes you make subtle changes to the configuration files of Apache, affecting certain aspects of the server’s performance but not others. To get these changes to the configuration files live, the standard route is to save your changes and restart the Apache service.
Interestingly enough though, this is in actual fact not necessary.
Why?
Well thanks to the reload command available to us, reloading the Apache configuration without stopping the service itself is as simple as calling:
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload
Nifty!