Nodejitsu

» see nodejitsu.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Node.js was about a year old when Nodejitsu started taking deployments. Charlie Robbins founded the company in New York in April 2010 along with Marak Squires and Paolo Fragomeni, at a point when the answer to "where do I put this Node app" was a bare VPS and a process you restarted by hand at three in the morning. Nodejitsu gave you a command line tool called jitsu, and typing jitsu deploy put your application on the internet. For a while that was close to magic.

They handed free instances to open source projects, which they called drones, and they ran a private npm registry for companies that could not put their packages in public. The company sat near the center of the Node community without being Joyent, who stewarded the runtime itself. Bloomberg Beta invested in June 2013.

GoDaddy acquired the team in February 2015. The announcement went out on the tenth: Nodejitsu was joining to work on GoDaddy's Website Builder, and the platform as a service business was over. Customers were pointed at Modulus with free credit to move. The service got one extension, to 30 December 2015, and then it stopped.

~ the case file ~

~ what came after ~

Charlie Robbins wrote forever, which kept a Node process alive before anyone in that world had systemd units for the job, and winston, still one of the most-used logging libraries in the ecosystem. node-http-proxy came out of the same shop.

That last one still gets pulled down on the order of fifteen million times a week and has been effectively unmaintained for years, with known leaks and maintainers who stopped answering long ago. A meaningful amount of production traffic in 2026 is passing through code originally written to keep a dead platform running.

~ the funny part ~

Nodejitsu told its customers to migrate to Modulus. Modulus had been bought by Progress Software the year before, was later renamed Xervo, and was itself finished inside two years. Everyone who did the responsible thing and moved on schedule got to do the entire migration a second time.

~ the receipts ~

I never deployed anything to Nodejitsu. By 2015 I was writing a different kind of software, and the hosting question at my desk was a Linux box I administered myself, which is exactly the chore Nodejitsu existed to remove. The company ended up in my work anyway, because npm install does not ask whether the authors are still in business. Most people running these modules now have no particular reason to know the company has been gone for a decade.

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