A virtual or a dedicated hosting machine is a standalone machine, that has its own Os and maintaining the latter up-to-date is a crucial, although underrated task. Not only can an update improve the overall performance of your websites, but it can also save you a great deal of troubles down the road. An update could be released for several reasons, the most frequent being to fix newly identified security holes, which may enable third-party individuals to access and alter the content that you have on the server. You may also see an improved efficiency of your web programs as updates might also be released for better compatibility between the Operating System and the configuration it works on so as to get the most out of the hardware. Also, if you keep your programs up-to-date, they might need a later OS version that will have the necessary software dependencies and will enable them to operate properly.