I haven't yet figured out how to get a Node.js process to start back up after the server has rebooted, and it looks like the traffic has been killed me a couple of times.

We use forever for this: https://github.com/foreverjs/forever

forever -w start yourFile.js

That'll keep it up and going as a daemon and reboot it when files change :)

No, that's not the issue. I actually am using forever. I'm not entirely sure what the problem was, but I think the entire VPS was falling over, so when it comes back there is nothing to kick off forever. It is fixed, now, though, by letting Apache serve the static files. I'm not a sysadmin and I've never had anywhere near this much traffic before.

Ah, perhaps setting up an @reboot cron job to kick off the forever process would do the trick.

Also, setting up a CDN in front of your static files is actually much easier than it sounds at first. You can just setup a Cloudfront distribution that uses your domain as its source; that should take off a lot of the load.

You can use PM2 pretty easy https://github.com/Unitech/pm2

Why do you need Node? Can't this just be statically served?

It mostly is, but I need it integrating with Stripe for the proprietary-license-that-I-totally-don't-expect people-to-buy-but-why-the-hell-not.

Can't you serve the main site statically, and have a dedicated page for the proprietary license and Stripe integration?

That's what I'm doing now. I thought I'd need to have both on the same port, but I was wrong.

so nobody sees your page because of a feature you're not sure you want to have anyway...?