ah yes, and you can have a single tier of storage that maintains a storage limit as well
i'm in the thick of finalising a fast garbage collection mark and sweep on it that can be used either as solo #layer1 or incorporated with a secondary #layer2
it's the meat in the sandwich of the mission of my last 5 months of work to build a relay that can be backed by any arbitrary large distributed data store so the relay deployments themselves can be small and cheap, about $15 a month VPS probably will be sufficient and you can run several and use round robin DNS or other load balancing with reverse proxy or similar, but for sharding benefits better to scatter users among them so each relay has a specific focus and demand level that is not generalised and the benefit of separating them lost
anyhow, it still will work out a lot faster than depending on a single distributed database back end for sure, that's the main goal of the work, because it's being funded by a shitcoin and they literally think they can make a usable relay inside a 1mb up/4mb down blockchain cluster smart contract
i know, how can they not know?
with this they will be able to cope with 100k users with a cluster of like 4 relays attached to their back end