I'm not familiar with the benefits of HostGator but how is this better than spinning up a free Heroku dyno to serve your node.js app?
That's also a very effective solution for low-traffic sites with a modest amount of host-side processing and more than enough for one sale a minute.
It's got great options for 3rd-party service integration too (e.g. free MongoDB hosting for < 512mb with MongoLab), and a very node.js friendly environment / deployment workflow.
Not trolling, genuinely curious what the benefit of this would be as an alternative.