> For what we need it's infinitely cheaper to just rent a Linode/DigitalOcean server, use something like Chef to spin up the services we need and voila. We prob

> For what we need it's infinitely cheaper to just rent a Linode/DigitalOcean server, use something like Chef to spin up the services we need and voila. We probably won't have to touch the servers for a very long time. Again: We're doing simple things - CRUD basically. To be fair, all of that takes time (and therefore, $$). For side projects it's probably not a big deal--the learning process itself is valuable--but if you're actually talking hard sums, Heroku isn't always as expensive as it seems. You'll need to manage: - Chef cookbooks and testing (this is a big one) - Deployment (using Chef standalone? Fabric? Git server + post-receive hooks?) - Backups (are you pushing WAL logs to S3? Have you tested recovery?) - System resourcing (didn't write a logrotate config for that custom service? Out of disk space?) - Monitoring (Pingdom, New Relic, etc.) in case it does go down? - etc, etc. It all adds up. For my own side project I went down the DO + Salt + Packer path, but my day job isn't as a dev/programmer so I had to spend a little time learning the idiosyncrasies of Salt and Upstart. These skills are valuable (for the next project down the line), but if I was part of a small team with a deadline then taking "detours" isn't always an option.