And not very effective either, because anything they do to solve the problem another way will likely create the valid need for an external IP. These days, virtual hosting is all virtual machines, so the IP justification is just there anyway.
Most of the stupid people don't, actually. That's the funny thing that surprises me -- just how obviously lame the justifications are, and how they are unable even with direct statements about how to justify the IP space to do so. My god, it's really not hard to build a valid justification for more space than you need -- seriously. But these people just can't pull it off.
Likewise, every company with whom I've had to debate the topic has failed within 18 months, so the problem pervades the organization 
Large data sets? So you are saying that 512-byte packets with no windowing work better? Bill, have you measured this?
Time to download a 100mb file over HTTP and a 100mb interface: 20 seconds.
Time to download a 100mb file over FTP and a 100mb interface: ~7 minutes.
And yes, that was FreeBSD with the old version openssl library that shipped with 6.3.
Large data sets? So you are saying that 512-byte packets with no windowing work better? Bill, have you measured this?
Time to download a 100mb file over HTTP and a 100mb interface: 20 seconds.
Time to download a 100mb file over FTP and a 100mb interface: ~7 minutes.And yes, that was FreeBSD with the old version openssl library that shipped with 6.3.
As someone who copies large network trace files around a bit, 100MB at 100mb, over what I presume is a local (low latency) link is barely a fair test. Many popular web servers choke on serving files >2GB or >4GB in size (Sigh). I'm in New Zealand. It's usually at least 150ms to anywhere, often 300ms, so I feel the pain of small window sizes in popular encryption programs very strongly. Transferring data over high speed research networks means receive windows of at least 2MB, usually more. When popular programs provide their own window of 64kB, things get very slow.
The switch to "HTTP requests include a hostname" had the same problem,
but still did occur; it may take a few years, but doable. Probably too
late to save IPv4 addresses; though. By then (I really, really, hope)
IPv6 will be mainstream.