I see a few people asking for this and at least one answer from staff that said you are not pursuing this at the moment because hardly anyone has expressed interest. Well, here's another guy that is expressing interest. Node.js is a genuine phenomenon and is steadily growing in popularity. You would do well to allow it.
We are still not pursuing it, but we are considering it. But bear in mind that it's not trivial to implement or maintain something like node.js, since any additions like that have to be made across all of the web servers. And honestly, we still don't see many requests for it, either here or via email, helpdesk, social media, etc. We have to weigh the cost of implementation/maintenance against the benefit to X number of users, and so far that X just isn't sufficient for node.js I'm afraid. Things change quickly though, and as you've noted, node.js is becoming more popular, so we don't rule it out. We never rule anything out!
I think that you may not be getting requests because devs just go elsewhere to host node.js. Microsoft Visual Studio does node and so does Azure. I have a Winhost site and it works great, but I go elsewhere to host node because I have no choice. I think you would get a lot of interest from the MS community in supporting it.
@smatthews1999 we get inquiries about our service through the sales@ channel, and that's where we log and monitor feature requests. So even if no one has mentioned it here in the forum, we still know how many people have asked us if we support it (before going elsewhere, if that's what happens). So again, we are considering it. But it's not particularly simple to implement it on shared Windows servers, which is why you see Azure supporting it, but very few (any?) shared hosts supporting it. If it's feasible and we can fit it into the development pipeline, we will certainly add support for it. I just can't say when that might happen.
It is being supported by other shared hosts. They use what Azure uses, an IIS plugin, iisnode. https://github.com/tjanczuk/iisnode You still need node.js on the server but it is served and managed through IIS. The developers (us) don't mess with node instances, etc. we let IIS handle that plumbing. I had an account at Winhost but ultimately let it expire because I wanted to start doing node.js programming but do not want multiple accounts at multiple hosts, or more than I already have. I'm a techie and not one to bother emailing sales or posting on forums to find out if someone supports such-and-such feature. I quickly scan the website and/or forums. And as you can see the iisnode page itself directed me to where I could find it in use. I didn't need to bother emailing here, as I found this post, and decided 'hey, they're not going to do it anytime soon'. This is one of those 'progressive' or 'newer' technologies that is not a fad or some small new tool, especially when Microsoft supports it within their own cloud systems. It is taking off in its own little way within the .NET ecosystem and I think you're missing out on getting some of that business. Especially those who have had bad experiences at some of those other hosts (myself included) and wouldn't mind a managed host instead of going all the way to Azure.
