You might get better answers over on ServerFault, but there's a description of one user's experience here using supervisord. You're going to need to use some sort of process watcher to keep the node process alive, and another common recommendation seems to be to reverse-proxy connections to the node process somehow. I'd probably vote for nginx (this way you can have nginx handle the logging, authentication, or any other higher-level HTTP features you need as opposed to somehow baking them into node), but the aforementioned article mentions haproxy in the comments here and there which may be more lightweight. Your choice of reverse-proxy will probably depend largely on whether or not you need WebSocket support.
I'm not sure any more "standard" workflow exists for node just yet; it's not quite as mature as something like Rails that has a myriad of ways to keep a webapp running.
