Heroku offers the Standard New Relic tier for free, so there's no reason not to use it. The pro tier has definite advantages, but isn't required to do what is b

Heroku offers the Standard New Relic tier for free, so there's no reason not to use it. The pro tier has definite advantages, but isn't required to do what is being described in the article. As for unicorn, unless your application is a real memory hog it should be possible to run 2 workers, which is a big improvement over using thin. But this is now the standard advice being given by Heroku, so there's not much new here.