2 questions

Hi I have a couple of questions. One about hosting and the other about IP addresses. The first on the IP's......... I have been speaking to a company that I am looking at getting a dedicated server from. They ONLY do one IP address per server and use name-based hosting. I have asked for dedicated IP's, but their answer has been that all hosting companies are going to have to go to name-based hosting now. What is everyone's feeling on this? Years ago, the company I was with used name-based and I remember that the search engines did not like this On to hosting, the above server is a Cobalt Raq 4i. Does anyone else on the list use one of these and what do you think? I want to make sure that it's easy enough to compile latest php and mysql whenever I want to Thanks for any advice Ade