[In reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7219005]
Here's the history, hope it helps.
I wrote the original version of the npm registry in a day or two on top of CouchDB. I built it quickly and didn't think much about scale.
Isaacs continued to improve and maintain that code. At one point he even wrote up an open standard for generic js package registries for CommonJS but they didn't seem to care (they were too busy arguing about promises).
At the time I wrote the initial code I was employed at CouchOne and we had a small CouchDB hosting platform operated by Jason Smith which is where we ran the registry free of charge. Later on, after CouchOne was aquired by Membase and became Couchbase, it decided to break off the hosting company and give/sell it to Jason Smith, which became IrisCouch.