Setting up multiple user accounts

Sometimes I can search google for hours, even days, and never find what I want. I know it's there, but either I don't have the right keywords or other info is popping up for the right keywords. So, here's my question:

I have a virtual hosted account and I need to setup one or more seperate user directories where the user can have their own password restricted ftp access to that directory. How do I do this and can you point me to some web guides that I can bookmark as well? Thanks. Oh, btw, I don't want the users to have write access to any directory other than their own...probably obvious, but...

Oh, forgot to add, I don't have a control panel. I will need to setup htaccess manually. I have some experience with it so I'm not totally green.