A virtual or a dedicated hosting machine is a standalone machine, which has its own Os and always keeping the latter up-to-date is a crucial, although underrated task. Not simply can an update improve the functionality of your sites, but it can also save you a lot of troubles in the future. An update may be released for a number of reasons, the most prevalent being to fix recently found security holes, which may allow third-party people to access and modify the content that you have on the hosting machine. You will also see an improved overall performance of your web applications as updates might also be released for better compatibility between the Operating System and the configuration it works on in order to get the most out of the hardware. Additionally, if you keep your applications up-to-date, they may also need a later Operating system version which will have the needed software dependencies and will allow them to work properly.