This may be cheaper up-front, but scales terribly which will increase costs exponentially whenever there is a need for growth. Additionally, like others have m

This may be cheaper up-front, but scales terribly which will increase costs exponentially whenever there is a need for growth. Additionally, like others have mentioned, a simple memory leak from one app will affect every other app on this box. Also, it doesn't sound like there's any redundancy. What happens when the HD blows up? If they fired these app up as separate VMs, they could at least scale each to what their needs are and only pay for what they are using. I manage an app architecture that consists of several Heroku apps along with a couple DBs at mongoHQ for under $100/month. Heroku definitely isn't the cheapest solution, but it allows me to scale horizontally and takes the massive load of sysadmin tasks off my back so I can focus on development.