The article isn't completely accurate in that it states that you need to build your application in a certain way in order to host it on Heroku, which isn't true

The article isn't completely accurate in that it states that you need to build your application in a certain way in order to host it on Heroku, which isn't true. I just don't see Heroku in same category as something like GAE. Heroku places no requirements on your code that you wouldn't find through general best practise when building scalable applications. A lot of people will cite the read-only filesystem as a special requirement (which requires S3 or similar), but this is a common requirement with clustered systems. Yes you might have a local SAN that you can use as a local filesystem but the point is the same. With the multiple applications I've deployed to Heroku I don't think any would not run on a 'regular' VPS as is. There's no Heroku specific code in there period. In fact, if I have changed my approach to better suit hosting on Heroku, it's generally been changing it to a better approach that would suit all types of hosting.