Well guys

I was planning a website where there will be multiple users, and I wanted to give each of them their dedicated domain(like) name.

Say, robert.domain.com or julie.domain.com

I was wondering what would be a better practice here, should I create real subdomain here, or should I just use a .htaccess file to redirect them to something like, say: domain.com/user.php?user=robert or domain.com/user.php?user=julie

The advantage of using the .htaccess redirect could be, for me, that I can make the website as usual, and simply create a .htaccess file to give an illusion to the users that they have their own space.

The advantage of using real subdomains could be that my server will get rid of the extra work of redirecting each time. But then, I will have to figure out how to fetch user specific content from the database without needing to copy the same files in every sub folder.

Your views guys? What you would do in this case?