Nice one geekboy

I want to understand Linux services better. Most of the time if I want to run a process in the background, I just use nohup and &

And put the commands in either init.d or crontab.

But lately I've seen some more complex scripts where it's called like logstash start/stop which does a free things including recording the PID somewhere?

In Linux terms it seems to be called starting a daemon. But what's the difference, benefit to all this complexity?