Many people use forever https://github.com/nodejitsu/forever , which has become pretty much industry standard.

If you are on Ubuntu, you can also use init scripts ( google 'ubuntu upstart' ), that will do much the same thing, and are guaranteed to if the server ever gets restarted.

Here is my upstart script for example https://gist.github.com/qbert65536/5271721 .

It gets run when the server starts, you also control them with

start myapp, stop myapp, restart myapp , where myapp.conf is the name of the upstart script.