I have a question about portals that I'm hoping someone can answer...

I'm trying to figure out the actual differences between a parent portal and a child portal.  I know a parent portal has a URL like this: "newportal.mysite.com", while a child portal has a URL like this: "www.mysite.com/newportal", and I always assumed there was some technical differences between them.  However, the other day I took a copy of my old website, and put it up on another server because I needed some information off of it.  Since the information was in a child portal, and the original hostname was in use on another server, I tried entering a new hostname for that portal.  I was surprised when it worked, a portal that was created as a child portal was working fine as a parent portal.

So, does anyone know if there are any technical differences at all between the two?  It would be awesome if I could use portals in either mode simply by changing their URLs!

Those folders are what got me really wondering, thanks for clearing that up.  So, given this information, I think I will make a habit of creating most of my portals as child portals and then convert them to parent portals so they can be used either way...

Thanks!