IPs are an upsale for hosting companies. In todays terms many hosting companies try and undercut each other and sell incredible, fully managed dedicated servers for SUB $100 Per Month. I have seen companies offer FULL 100MBPS Unmetered Servers, Dual Xeon 2.8ghz, 1 gig Ram, 1x300gig SATA HDD for $199/month. FULLY MANAGED!!!!! How can a company profit there? Well, charging $XX amount per month for IPs, Monitoring, "off hours time". Not to mention they are in Ghetto Colo's anyway. Some maybe running off Verizon Fios or DSL in a basement somewhere
There is no way for a hosting company to profit there. Now, build someone a decent server (decent as in 2.4ghz p4, 1 gig ram, 80-150gig HDD, 1000 gig bandwidth) for $100-$120 per month with IP's as needed (per ARIN rules) and you tend to make a decent profit off of the initial sale. You don't need to "nickle-n-dime" your customers. Customers hate that.
You also don't need to be greedy. Something that hosting companies tend to get. I co-founded Tear2 as a second hosting company (my first one I founded in 1997 and sold in 2000) for the basic reason that hosting companies nowadays are too bent on over-charging, nick-n-diming, and flat out scamming their customers. I am a strong advocate for providing a good service thats decently priced (not under or over priced) and just being nice to people. Growing a business like that tends to lead happier clients, which leads to more clients
Jim