No problem, here's my two (relatively unorganized) two cents: With Heroku (frankly also thanks to Ruby on Rails) I can be a sys-admin, developer, database admi

No problem, here's my two (relatively unorganized) two cents: With Heroku (frankly also thanks to Ruby on Rails) I can be a sys-admin, developer, database administrator and QA all at once; far easier than before. For the price of $100k I have seen developers build successful products that used to cost $1M+ to develop. On Heroku you definitely pay for convenience and ease of use, knowing that you get a benefit in doing so by being able to focus on the development of your app, the part that matters. The costs grow if you get traffic, but through careful management (such as packing multiple processes into one dyno), you can reduce costs. Even if many find Heroku's prices high, they are still much lower than what you see in enterprise land, or even on AWS if you aren't careful. Heroku's documentation is also incredibly good, and this helps you a lot to move fast. Almost by accident, simply by following Heroku documentation I have found that developers end up following good cloud server practices almost by default (i.e. because Heroku forces you to build your app to follow certain conventions, conventions needed for making your app horizontally scaleable; such as delegating clock processes to a separate process, and not allowing dynos to manipulate or rely on unique file memory specific only to them). If I architectured or configured my own servers it would have taken 10x as long, exposed me to far more security issues, and I would have probably screwed it up any way. The lesson from this is that I think as developers we need far less freedom to configure than we think we need. So in conclusion, if you're a small to medium-sized app that does not have complex server or bandwidth needs (i.e. you are not Imgur or Pied Piper), then I highly recommend it. I'm sure many Oracle salesman will be unhappy with this opinion, but take my word for it that the vast majority of applications do not need complex, overengineered server systems to be successful. (After all as a startup, you should not be wasting months planning on how you will scale to support 10 million concurrent users. I've seen that hubris distract failing startups before.)