By not using the www
subdomain, you can suffer a performance hit when delivering static content, as noted here: http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#cookie_free. As I understand it, if you use http://example.com/
and http://static.example.com
for static content, any cookies you set on the main domain will be passed with requests to your static subdomain.
This can be avoided quite easily, by buying a distinct domain for static content. However, this can certainly be dealt with by using a www
subdomain.
Then again, this is a very minor con, and really only comes into play when you're dealing with a high-demand site. (For example, Digg uses http://digg.com
and http://*.diggstatic.com
).
Ultimately, I would say that this is such a minor problem that it can probably be dealt with if performance starts to suffer. Don't optimize prematurely, and all that...
And, as @Tomas Lycken points out, make sure you account for www
even if you don't use the subdomain.