How does Stack Overflow (and other web sites) remove the \'www\' prefix when it\'s entered as part of a URL?
Is it a redirect, a rewrite or something else entirely?<
This is going a long way back, but as far as I know this is a DNS setup. I think you don't need to specify a HOST address (WWW is the name of the host (or computer/cluster...) that the site resides on/in.).
I think you can then set it up to send all requests to a default host.
Not 100% sure, but check out what is possible with DNS.
Hope that helps or at least get's you going in the right direction.