This problem has nothing to do with node. It is a problem with a hosting service for node.

JavaScript has exceptions. It has booleans. It has integers. What more do you need to handle an error?

Error handling is node is terrible due to a lack of consistency about errors. Any function can potentially either:

a) throw an exception, which will crash your app

b) emit an error event, which will crash your app if you aren't handling it

c) include the error in the first response of the callback

Domains are a knee jerk reaction to try and remedy this, but it's a pretty gross bandaid. I doubt that Nodejitsu's specific issues here are related to this, but it's one of the main reasons that I've moved away from building things in Node.

"JavaScript has exceptions"

But I miss those colorful exceptions like javax.management.modelmbean.InvalidTargetObjectTypeException :P

hosting service presumably built on node... it's a PITA tracking down errors in production in node moreso than any other popular language ever