[lylepstein]

Yeah. In my experience, Heroku starts being a drag at moderate scale:

1. You still have to worry about your systems, as Heroku has its own outages, not to mention the other pieces of your infrastructure like DBs, queues, etc.

2. Architecture flexibility goes way down, as vertical scaling isn't a real option on Heroku (and a surprising number of problems can be easily solved in the short term by just throwing big iron at them).

3. The premium you pay on the hardware you're using starts to add up, especially when you're in the realm of "let's solve this problem in the short term by throwing machines at it."

Of course, that's not to say you can't use a hybrid approach of, say AWS + Heroku to solve some of these, but it's a bigger hurdle to clear if you've outsourced all your systems work to Heroku from the beginning. You suddenly find yourself having to figure this stuff out at some level of scale, vs growing it organically and learning as you go.

[cpursley]

Yeah, this is what I'm doing. Using Heroku for their Postgres offering and AWS with convox.io (part of the current ycombinator batch) for deploying web services to AWS.