Sorry for digging up an old thread, but for me, there would be a real benefit from having the websocket running on a different port.

I run nodebb on shared hosting at uberspace.de, using Apache with Pound as a reverse proxy. Neither Apache nor Pound support websockets, so I’m stuck with the ajax fallback. This has become a real problem since in v0.6.1, the menu for category permissions in the admin panel works with websockets only. So I had the guys at uberspace open a port on the machine for me and installed the ssl certificate in nodebb. Now I can access my installation with websockets and everything, but have to use the port number in the url, which is rather ugly. Also, this breaks the non-websocket version without the port number, because in that case, Pound does the ssl for me, but now node tries to do it, too, because it detects the https in the request url …

The ideal configuration for me, thus, would be to run the socket.io-portion of nodebb as an entirely different application on its own port with its own ssl configuration and so on. The web app would be served through the reverse proxy for nice urls and the browser would then talk to the socket.io-app running on its own port, bypassing Apache and Pound.