Svchost Errors Can Cause Serious Problems By: Shawni Groezinger | - Service host, or svchost for short, is an vital windows system process. Svchost is needed in executing processes from dlls, which are regarded as the cores of windows architecture. Since svchost processes are necessary in executing numerous windows services, there will likely be many instances of svchost running concurrently at any given time. Ideally, svchost.exe must never be terminated as this can cause system instability.