Comment by deleo

If I was Yahoo I'd think twice before adopting something like Node.js, but if you're a little guy that wants to scale on the cheap and is willing to take risks because the alternative simply won't work for what you're trying to do, then just use Node.js. Django, PHP, Rails with Apache in front of them aren't designed to handle thousands of persistent connections and it would be far more expensive to scale the traditional web-stacks to handle them.

As some Joyent guy was saying there's real resources behind Node.js, it isn't just a cool hack made by some promising Jedi but it needs to fit your use-case. If you're designing a real-time web app and you have a limited budget then go for it, I don't think there's anything better out there now (except for Tornado, Twisted, which is just a matter of taste) unless you're Yahoo, Google, etc...