Purpose of subdomains

Hi i understand the structure concept of subdomains and addon domains. My question is a bit deeper than that.

What is the real benefit to have a valid subdomain? In other words what is the real benefit to using the control panel subdomain option and adding it there vrs just adding a folder to your domain?

First i would rather type

http://www.mysite.com/subdomain than http://subdomain.mysite.com

Plus the fact that my experience has been that you may have to get mod rewrite involved with an cp created sub domain.

So what is the real benefit of doing it thru control panel, and what is the benefit of having

http://subdomain.mysite.com ?

The way i do it now is just create a folder in my dir manually and load the files in there and i have http://www.mysite.com/mysubdomain, what am i loosing out on doing it that way?

If all you're doing is "Hosting" a website on the alternate host record, then it's simply to make it "easier" for people to type - which as the majority wont type it but follow a search-result or a link, wont matter at all.

If you're doing different things with them, like using one for webmail, one for control panel access, one for each project etc, then it's for classification reasons.

thanks yeah most of the time i dont have email wit them i use my main site email. So thats cool at least i dont have to change stuff lol. Appreciate the info i wondered about that for quite a while, even ask the tech over at one of the big boy hosting companies awhile back when i used to be with them and they gave me some lame answer and i knew he didnt know so i just dropped it.

I remember when everything was in the format

http://www.domain.name

The www effectively meant "The website"

Then people started selling parts of their Domain Name for others to use, which resulted in the format

username.domain.name

The www then became redundant

I now setup my own websites up without the www as there isn't really any need for it any more

As people read from left to right having a sub-section of a website to the left of the Domain Name can be useful, such as webmail, cpanel, and so on

You cant point a subdirectory to another IP, you cant set custom MX records for a subdirectory, you cant install a unique SSL certificate on a subdirectory.. Those are a few reasons that a subdomain is superior.