What were people using previously? Just plopping their node.js or whatever straight on the network?
https://github.com/nodejitsu/node-http-proxy/
Easy to set up, and has the benefit of reducing the number of processes I need to maintain (my node server and my proxy server are the same).
1. Run nginx with something like HAProxy/Varnish infront
2. Run nginx alone with the app server on port 80/443 and the websocket server running on a special port. The app was then proxyed using the built in http_proxy, while the websocket was handled by tcp_proxy.