[Discuss] one vs many static IP addresses

[adler at stephenadler.com (Stephen Adler)]

Happy new year BLU,

My new years resolution was to clean up my static IP addresses I have 
with verizon and comcast. Being an linux nut I decided to keep both 
verizon and comcast static IP addresses, but figured there's no real 
need for both and just to stick with one provider. In this "clean up", 
I'm consolidating a bunch of domain names set to the comcast ip 
addresses to the verizon ones.

Currently I have 5 comcast static ip addresses and 5 verizon static ip 
address. The reason I got 5 in the first place with comcast when I first 
got my access to the internet when I moved into my home, was that it was 
like only a few dollars more a month to have 5 instead of 1. But now 
that I'm consolidating my domain names, and the use of apache virtual 
hosting, the question I have is if there is any reason to use more then 
1 static IP address to run my web and sshd services from my basement 
server? Would it make sense that if I have more than one server in my 
basement and I want each of them to access the internet directly, then I 
would assign one static IP to each server. If I only have one server in 
my basement then only one IP address would be sufficient. Or is there 
another subtly I'm missing regarding static IP address and how apache 
would use them? Currently, in order to assign them IP addresses, I have 
several network cards in my server and then have aliased some of the 
network cards with multiple ip addresses. It seems to me the cleanest 
way of managing the IP addresses is to just assign one ip address to one 
network card and then use the apache virtual host configuration to run 
multiple web sites off a single IP address.

Any thoughts on the matter would be very helpful.

Thanks BLU.

Cheers. Steve.