I have spun off the http server to the background and have it running now and I've also made my node application to talk to it fully ready to go live. So now the system is staying awake by itself. This is always a painful step of deployment but I've finally got the hang of going live with node applications using pm2. It took awhile but I'm now comfortable with it.
I'm pretty happy with how the api server in BASIC is talking to node. The next big endpoint I really need is the ability to specify the account, file and item id and then retrieve the data associated with it. This basically lets me use the entire D3 database from node without writing anymore BASIC code. Extremely slow as writing a custom BASIC program will always be better but this would be a good endpoint just to display record specific information quickly.