A virtual or a dedicated hosting machine is a standalone machine, which has its own Os and keeping the latter up-to-date is an essential, albeit underrated task. Not simply can an update enhance the performance of your websites, but it can also save you lots of troubles down the road. An update may be released for a number of reasons, the most prevalent being to fix newly found security holes, which may enable third-party people to access and change the content you have on the hosting machine. You will also see an improved efficiency of your web apps since updates might also be released for better compatibility between the Operating System and the configuration it operates on so as to get the most out of the hardware. Also, if you keep your programs up-to-date, they could also require a later OS version which will have the needed software dependencies and will enable them to function properly.