Are you certain that nginx is running? If you can ping, ssh and can see your site returned at port 8080 (Node’s process) but cannot load your site on the default ports 80/443 (Nginx process) I would recommend restarting nginx with:

service nginx restart

and checking your logs in /var/log/nginx/error.log to see if additional information about the issue was recorded there.

What does curl at localhost port 80 give? Any firewall? Selinux? When you say doesn’t work, what exactly happens? Times out? 404. These details will help troubleshooting.

You need

curl -I http://localhost:80

This will tell you the status with the http header. It’s totally fine if the server sends empty response. It’s the headers that matter and will help tell if the site is down or not.

aha. Works like a charm. Now can you do the same but use the actual IP or fqdn from your machine?

This verifies that the server is working fine. Now your app needs to send some actual data that the browser can render such as an html markup / xml / json etc.

Your backend server doesn’t seem to be sending any data. Try curl -I http://localhost:8080 or opening the same in a browser. If you need help then just ping me at shivanand at converticacommerce dot com