Hi, so we wanted to chime in a bit. We are building our node.js hosting platform (nodeJSCloud) on our own hardware, in a data center. Going this route vs using 3rd party hardware EC2 or Rackspace, gives us complete flexibility to do some nifty things. We are going to e-mail out a newsletter shortly with additional details.

For one Joyents no.de platform runs on their "accelerators" which are basically Solaris containers and there is a different package management system to deal with than you may be used to (they use pkgsrc) but it's pretty easy to figure out. Mostly you will just be using node package manager (npm) for node packages.