> Paying for an Heroku dyno is basically the same as renting (and releasing) a small virtual server for the duration of a running process (and for possibly very

> Paying for an Heroku dyno is basically the same as renting (and releasing) a small virtual server for the duration of a running process (and for possibly very short periods of time) > Normally, we aren't paying for processes on (dedicated or virtual) servers, but are buying the server capacity whatever we do with it (limited by the server resource allocation). That's one of the thing that makes me say we pay for processes, on heroku (even if it's indeed oversimplified). A dedicated or virtual server is not only about process and memory. You can have access to sendmail on it, handle uploads, store long and exhaustive logs, perform specific task via third party application (like resizing images), ssh to machine if any problem need deep inspection, etc. The heroku model is about extremely specialized services. Whatever you need that is not processor share or memory needs an external addon. I'm ok with that, but it has to be stated clearly. It's not at all like if you had a standard virtual server. Your stance "Paying for an Heroku dyno is basically the same as renting (and releasing) a small virtual server for the duration of a running process" would perfectly do. Way better than heroku's one "Dynos are isolated, virtualized Unix containers, that provide the environment required to run an application" which could let think that it's a regular virtual server. Well, sendmail, for me, belongs to an "environment required to run an application".