Advantages of auto redirect to www version of domain?

Hi:
When setting up a domain, isn't it always beneficial to do a redirect, so for example, typing in:

http://mydomain.com

redirects to the "www" version, or:

http://www.mydomain.com

This cuts down on the number of hits (as http://mydomain.com/test.gif and http://www.mydomain.com/test.gif counts as 2 seperate hits), and also bandwidth transfer, as brower cache often treats the above two images as seperate images, doubling the bandwidth on them.

I guess my question is, are the above assumptions correct about the advantages of doing a redirect in this manner? Any disadvantages?

Thanks,

 

 

 

 

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