A virtual or a dedicated hosting machine is a standalone machine, which has its own Os and maintaining the latter up-to-date is an essential, albeit underrated task. Not only can an update improve the general performance of your websites, but it will also save you lots of problems later on. An update could be released for a variety of reasons, the most prevalent being to fix recently identified security holes, which may permit third-party individuals to access and change the content you have on the server. You will also see an improved efficiency of your web applications as updates may 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 might also need a later OS version that will have the required software dependencies and will enable them to work properly.