A virtual or a dedicated hosting server is a standalone machine, that has its own Operating System and keeping the latter up-to-date is a crucial, although underrated task. Not only can an update improve the general performance of your sites, but it could also save you lots of issues down the road. An update may be released for many different reasons, the most widespread being to fix newly discovered security holes, which may permit third-party people to access and alter the content which you have on the hosting machine. You will also see an improved overall performance of your web apps because updates could 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. Furthermore, if you keep your applications up-to-date, they might need a later OS version that will have the needed software dependencies and will permit them to work adequately.