A virtual or a dedicated hosting machine is a standalone machine, that has its own Operating System and maintaining the latter up-to-date is an important, albeit underrated task. Not simply can an update enhance the performance of your sites, but it will also save you lots of troubles later on. An update could be released for a number of reasons, the most frequent being to fix newly identified security holes, which may enable third-party individuals to access and alter the content which you have on the hosting machine. You can also see an improved efficiency of your web programs because updates might also be released for better compatibility between the Operating System and the configuration it functions on so that you can get the most out of the hardware. In addition, if you keep your applications up-to-date, they might also need a later Operating system version that will have the needed software dependencies and will enable them to operate properly.