A virtual or a dedicated hosting server is a standalone machine, that has its own Operating System and always keeping the latter up-to-date is a crucial, though underrated task. Not simply can an update improve the performance of your websites, but it will also save you a great deal of issues in the future. An update can be released for a number of reasons, the most widespread being to fix newly identified security holes, which may allow third-party individuals to access and modify the content you have on the hosting machine. You might also see an improved performance of your web applications because updates could also be released for better compatibility between the Operating System and the configuration it works on so that you can get the most out of the hardware. In addition, 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 enable them to function properly.