Assuming competitive pricing it seems like a high brow alternative to a small LAMP app. I used to contract for a telco in my country and we had a shared server

Assuming competitive pricing it seems like a high brow alternative to a small LAMP app. I used to contract for a telco in my country and we had a shared server with a bunch of virtual hosts for various purposes. Data capture forms, family and friends schemes, corporate social responsibility stuff etc. The core systems stuff was all Java enterprise inter-operating with off the shelf Oracle and TIBCO stuff. Building those small once off apps into the main infrastructure would have required involving the bigger suppliers who were more expensive and would be stonewalling you with change requests before long. If you weighed the risk and determined that you were happy with these non-revenue path applications being subject to that risk, I think it might be ok. That said using something like Heroku is close enough and at least your application code is mostly portable.