I am unsure if this is intrinsically stupid, but in our university, we have subdomains of the form www.faculty.university.de, mail.faculty.university.de, ssh-ga

I am unsure if this is intrinsically stupid, but in our university, we have subdomains of the form www.faculty.university.de, mail.faculty.university.de, ssh-gate.faculty.university.de, mayflower.servers.faculty.university.de and so on. At least the ssh-gate is different from the www-server, and it appears the www-server is equal to the mail-server. Stripping the www here would be a world of hurt. Long story short: the www is not necessarily stupid, especially if you use it to designate a web server from different servers.