I am quite fond of Heroku. It solves a lot of things for you and makes it more obvious that you should decouple things and use other services from the get go.

I am quite fond of Heroku. It solves a lot of things for you and makes it more obvious that you should decouple things and use other services from the get go. The time you spend doing sysadmin things could be spent writing code or otherwise growing the business. Also, as you grow you aren't going to need to hire a bunch of sysadmins just to build, manage, and deploy more infrastructure. Saving even one $60,000 a year employee buys you what, $5,000 a month in infrastructure? That's quite a bit on Heroku + various addons.