Some small businesses and start-ups are standardizing on Ubuntu Server Edition because it’s a low-cost alternative to Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003 and 2008. The VAR Guy wonders: Could a bigger trend be coming? Will hundreds — or thousands — of small businesses make the move to Ubuntu Server Edition?

If you’re running a small business and you’re in the market for server, you might want to consider SME Server, a Linux distribution customised specifically for the small and medium sized business environment.

Linux is used as a server all the time. From branch-offices using Linux and Samba to Google running, well everything, on Linux, it's the operating system for choice for most businesses. Except that is, for small offices. There, Microsoft's SBS (Small Business Server) is the server of choice. The Clear Foundation wants to change that with their ClearOS 5.1 small business server distribution.

Ubuntu Linux is moooovin’ on up in the Linux server neighborhood. When Sun announced a major open source initiative targeting small and midsize businesses this week, a lot of people failed to realize that Sun would include servers certified for Ubuntu. Here’s the scoop.

This article by David Overton covers the process of finishing the network protection and routing setup and configuring the protection of the data on the server

It's funny isn't it? By default, any Linux distribution comes with business server functionality like an e-mail, file, and print serving, but Microsoft still gets the lion's share of the small business server world. Steve J. Vaughan-Nichols wonders what's going on here?

There was a long time that I was looking for a way to put away my old CRM server! But why? Because I had installed a virtualization environment with Xen and all my servers are turned to small VPS on a nice pretty infrastructure. The base point was that the CRM had a USB/Lock and there was no way to take the lock under a virtualized VPS. This tutorial shows how you can set up a USB-over-IP server.

If you need to set up a compact, secure, easily configurable Web server in as short a time, then we recommend installing Abyss Web Server. The software is available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD operating systems. Depending on your needs, you may choose one of the two available editions. The free personal edition (X1) is a fully usable web server with no limitations. The professional edition (X2) includes an immediate access at no additional cost to new minor and major versions for a small amount of money. Abyss isn't open source software, but it is an interesting product and can provide a full web server with no cost, on older hardware, and with high-performance results.

Microsoft still has a stranglehold on the desktop and servers for small business. While wheels are in motion for the former, the answer to the latter may already be here.