pro/cons of virtual hosting services

> 
> To repeat: The second soloution proposed provides all aspects of
> provider independence.  Why should we waste address space if wasting it
> does not provide significant additional functionality? 

Because the customer wants something else (and they pay your wage too
in the end).

Please realize that we are talking about a purely -superficial- difference
of ~$3000* for running a seperate server (PC based) vs. a virtual one 
(typical production costs for a commercial WWW server are multiple 10'000 
of dollars, so we are really talking about noise). Neither solution 
conserves address space, but at least the virtual server conserves certain 
other (more important?) resources *.

Naturally the correct solution would be for the HTTP protocol to pass
the complete URL to the server, however it's too late for that.

Simon