strange place for the .htpasswd

I made a protected directory for the admin site and was curious how DA would build this.

I protected a directory (test) in the private_html. I could find the .htaccess in the directory "test". Great, that's logical. But to my surprise the .htpasswd is written to:
/home/name/domains/domain.ext/.htpasswd/private_html/test/.htpasswd ?

It is working great so I'm not complaining. I just can't follow the logic here. Who can shine his/her light on this ?!

Thanks,
Kark

You have to put it outside the www directory otherwise it's world wide accesible. This way it's only accesible from the server itself and nobody can download the .htpasswd file and crack it.

In my bad times I cracked some passwords and got into sites I wasn't supposed too

Oh right. A crystal clear answer. Thanks!