Setting up virtual PC (virtual box) as a web server

For direct communication between your guest OS and your host you could either set up bridged networking or host-only network. An alternative would be to configure as NAT and setup the corresponding port forwardings. I think you can unfortunately not circumvent reading the networking part of the VBox manual: http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch06.html

You can certainly setup a couple of shared folders to share your files. Depending on your guest OS this is more or less convenient - but not difficult at all regardless of which OS you take.

FTP is a good option for Web development since most Web Development capable IDEs support FTP publishing. An alternative is to set up WebDAV.

If you need help with setting up the stuff you will have to specify which guest OS you are going to use (Linux?)