We have a corporate policy that we do not offer services that consume IP address space on a per-site or per-user basis. The most common example of this is when a web site is assigned one (or more) static IP addresses, but it also applies to anonymous FTP sites and some other types of hosted services.
Assigning static IP addresses on a per-site basis is a practice that has devastated the Internet address space, so we don't participate in it. Tens of thousands of IP addresses can be assigned to a single rack of equipment in a datacenter somewhere, but there is a shortage of IP address space. That's not the right way to do things.
We regard this as an "Internet environmental" issue, and it's one about which we're prepared to be a little extremist. Basically, we believe that it's wrong for us to do it, so we don't do it. Not everyone agrees with us, and we definitely do lose business because of this position.
For standards-compliant web hosting (HTTP/1.1), there is no need to assign a static IP address, and no supported browser remains available that requires this. Static IP addresses also severely limit our ability to reroute around equipment that has problems or is being maintained, and even makes it tougher for you to benefit from our load balancing technology.
The most common reason people request a static IP address is to point external DNS at a site hosted with us. As part of our hosting service, we provide our own special DNS records for each site that you can link to external DNS using the CNAME capability that work even better than static IPs. These records preserve full fault tolerance and load balancing.