To have it survive your exiting you could take a look at Proc::Daemon. But if you want it up all of the time you absolutely should either periodically try to launch it from cron or else put it in your rc.d. A very common Unix mistake is to just leave critical processes running but not take the necessary steps to handle a reboot. Then a few months later when the project may have been all forgotten about (and the person may have moved on) when the box is rebooted for some reason stuff just starts failing for no apparent reason.

If you know people who are uncomfortable about rebooting Unix, people in their environment are probably making that mistake. Just because you can leave Unix up for months at a time doesn't mean that you should let people get in the habit of relying on that. If this is a problem then you should get into the habit of rebooting the servers on a regular basis whether or not they need it.

Of course if users and developers are properly trained then there is no reason not to leave it on. But this is a user issue, not an OS problem. However if you are running Windows NT you should reboot periodically on general principle. And that is an OS issue. (I hear that Win2K is better in this respect, but I am not running it.)

(Of course my laptop has not been rebooted in 95 days, and was rebooted then only because my wife wanted to move it for a bit...)