I would take a step back first and ask: Is production really the best place
to experiment? I strongly recommend experimenting somewhere else first. If
you truly are experimenting, and have never worked with node.js before, the
safer of the two options you asked about would be to start by putting the
app on a non-production cloud instance.

Furthermore, I'm not sure it makes sense to say which is better without
answering some other questions first, like: What are you trying to do? Why?
What are your requirements? What are your constraints?

For example, I needed to run a node.js app on a managed VM hosted by our
central IT org. I wanted to use a reverse proxy to handle SSL and some
other features that I did not want to handle in node. On a testing
(non-production!) VM, I first tried using nginx as a reverse proxy, but
setting up nginx on this VM was extremely painful. Our central IT org has
no experience with nginx, but they know Apache quite well. In investigating
options for using Apache as a reverse proxy, I discovered that Passenger
provides a lot of the features I wanted, plus some I hadn't even known I
wanted, and was very easy to set up on my VM. So I went with Apache +
mod_passenger. This tutorial helped a lot:
https://github.com/phusion/passenger/wiki/Phusion-Passenger%3A-Node.js-tutorial#why

David Naughton
--
Web Development
University of Minnesota Libraries
[log in to unmask]


On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 11:26 AM, Brian Zelip <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> I've had success running node and nginx on the same digital ocean droplet
> fwiw.
>
> Apparently node and apache need to be run alongside each other on separate
> ports. The answers to this question might be useful to your process:
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14369865/running-node-js-in-apache.
>
>
> Brian Zelip
> ---
> MS Student, Graduate School of Library & Information Science
> Graduate Assistant, Scholarly Commons
> University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
> zelip.me
>
> On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 11:03 AM, Junior Tidal <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
>
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I'd like to experiment with node.js on our production server to create a
> > small calendar app.
> >
> > I was wondering if it's better to run node.js on the same server with
> > Apache, or to set it up a separate cloud instance?
> >
> > I'm not sure if one is better than the other.
> >
> > Best,
> >
> > Junior Tidal
> > Assistant Professor
> > Web Services and Multimedia Librarian
> > New York City College of Technology, CUNY
> > 300 Jay Street, Rm A434
> > Brooklyn, NY 11201
> > 718.260.5481
> >
> > http://library.citytech.cuny.edu
> >
>