> ... deploying Node is much easier. If you want to be really quick and deploy to the cloud, take AWS and you are done in 13 steps:

Those 13 steps were about compiling node, not about serving node.

Serving node is more complex. The real steps in hosting node:

  1. Step up node environment. (explained in the "13 steps blog entry")
  2. Make sure your node app handles exceptions and doesn't just die when something goes wrong (aka: "don't use the built-in one line http start server line")
  3. Install monit/munin/god/upstart/whatever-else to restart your node servers if they die
  4. Set up cluster or node.js's built-in new cluster API
  5. Set up a load balancer, just in case you have performance issues in your app and you end up doing bigger work than you think you do, or have more traffic than you planned for
  6. Set up database, potentially worrying about scaling issues there
  7. Deployment and version rollback system, and dealing with the servers when you deploy code (need to restart them?).
  8. DDOS defense.

I can see why you would want an automated PaaS to take care of all these things for you.

I see two target markets for node.js:

  1. "Hey, you know Javascript, now you can write server side code too!"
  2. "Hey, server side guy, hate how hard it is to do async programming in Ruby/Python (because the majority of the libraries are synchronous?) Javascript can be used on the server and doesn't have that synchronous baggage!"

The second target market certainly knows about all these 8 things I listed, but the first might want/need a managed host.