Use same URL for multiple SharePoint sites

Question

Hi there,
Our requirement is to create multiple web applications in one Farm (which contains 1 Web Front End, 1 Application Server & 1 DB Server) using 80 port of Web Front End which is having single public IP.
There are number of ways of doing this - One way is to create new domain name for each web application (like www.abc.com; www.xyz.com); another way is to create multiple sub domains in a single domain name like www.sub1.abc.com; www.sub2.abc.com, etc.
However our requirement for URL naming convention for these web applications is "www.[Domain Name]/[Client Name]"  (like www.abc.com/client1, www.abc.com/client2, etc) 
In SharePoint we can achieve this if we create one Parent site and others as Child site. However we don't want to us this. 
So, is their any way where we can form URL of these web applications as "www.[Domain Name]/[Client Name]" 
Regards,
Adi

Answer 1

Is there a reason for this?  I would think subdomains would be ideal, but just curious on the reasoning.  Also, do they need a full web application, or simply different site collections?  If you just need site collections, and assuming you
don't have a massive number of them, you could use Managed Paths to explicitly allow a site collection immediately under the root url.  Be careful, though, Managed Paths can cause a lot of overhead after you go over 10-15 if you're hardware isn't up for
it (I would assume you wouldn't put 10-15 web apps on the farm anyway, cause that's also not so great).
There really isn't a way to do what you are asking for a full Web Application, only at the site collection level(which should be good from my limited understanding of your scenario)
I am very curious why subdomains wouldn't work, though, as they can all point to the same IP and takes no additional purchasing of domains or anything.
Christopher Webb MCM: SharePoint 2010 MCSM: SharePoint Charter MCT http://blog.christophermichaelwebb.com