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Are there any examples or conventions out there of how to use node.js to host multiple web apps?

I'm already aware that node itself can be used to build a server, but I'm curious as to whether there have been implementations where you aren't necessarily running it all the time. Strictly for the reason that perhaps there are multiple sites being hosted, each with their own copy of a framework, static files and custom functionality.

Or maybe you do run one instance of node and code a multiple site architecture to ensure one bad site doesn't take the server downin some way?

Virtual hosts, ensuring that one site can't crash others...these are all things that have been considered with other platforms, but I have had some difficulties finding for node! :)

I am already aware of connect, express and other middleware, however it doesn't cover what I'm asking here.

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If you're worried about runtime isolation, each "site" should run it's own node process. Then use a proxy like node-http-proxy that will do host header based routing. Another great node based option is bouncy, but you don't necessarily need to use node to do the host based routing. You could just as well use haproxy, nginx, etc.

The baseline RAM overhead of each node process is very small (~10mb - 15mb). Also, if you do HTTP based routing you can spread your sites easily across machines, user home directories, etc.

If you want to handle the site/host registration programmatically, I would use seaport and then communicate the hostname and host + port details back to the proxy so that the routing table can by dynamic. This would also make it fairly easy to scale a site across multiple node processes.

Good luck!

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Wouldn't 10 to 15 MB end up adding up quite a fair bit after a while? Say as compared to Apache vhosts running php which granted set up and tear down per request (but by that end up being very lean when not actually serving requests)?
@Omega 10mb per node process is nothing in terms of add up, where as 4MB per request in apache is huge, sure it takes zero when idling where as node takes 50-100-whatever but apache would take 4gb when handling 1000req/s. Your worrying about the wrong issue here.

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