Small retail stores are just waking up to the fact that websites are ingenious tool for raising awareness of the brand and also increasing sales. At this point in their business it is highly unlikely that they have the spare funds to buy all the equipment necessary to set up their own server room, and it is equally unlikely that it is economically feasible for them to pay the high monthly fees on a dedicated server with an online hosting company. It is in this situation that a company would find perfect to use for a virtual private server.
Virtual Private Servers were introduced to bridge the gap in cost and flexibility between a shared server space and a fully-fledged dedicated server. A small business is the perfect user of a VPS service because they have very little spare funds that need to account for the fact that their business might grow in the future, and they may need more on this server further down the line. A retail store would need server space primarily for setting up their website in order to showcase their stock and provide information to customers wishing to visit their store.
Some larger stores will also set up online store fronts that are capable of handling orders placed via the Internet. Using a shared server space for any of this would be far too risky as there is a high chance of downtime and shared servers are known to have resource Allocation problems. Virtual Private servers make use of separate hardware and software components so that companies get the same performance and stability and they would with dedicated server at a fraction of the price.