Your last sentence hides another option which is the route we took: outsource devops. It cost us about $2000 in consultant fees for a fully setup system, easy t

Your last sentence hides another option which is the route we took: outsource devops. It cost us about $2000 in consultant fees for a fully setup system, easy to expand and add hardware to, and much more cost effective long term than AWS or Heroku. Our guy runs a small ops company who have 24/7 on-call. It's really the perfect solution.