non-op

[James Paul <jamespaul () metconnect com>]

I apologize if this is off topoic…

I am researching the deployment of a free personal web-hosting service. Normally each user's html documents reside in a 
subdirectory of the document tree where the subdirectory is named for the user.

  …/htdocs/
          / \
        /     \
user1 …  userN

Thus a users URL is www.site.com/userN.

We currently have about 5000 users on the service. This is spread across three different single directory filesystems. 
As the number of users grows I imagine that this will become unworkable due to the nature of the file systems. One 
solution is to put groups of users in several subdirectories but this could make the user URLs messy.

www.site.com/sub1/sub2/userN

Can someone please comment on methods of keeping short clean user URLs while making the storage of many small web-pages 
more efficient and scaleable? What kind of backends are currently being used to serve up plain old static content with 
inline stuff? Also, how are directories being indexed for retrieval?

How have are the larger installations currently working this?

Thanks in advance,

James Paul