[techiferous]

"Server/hosting wise, I leave everything to Heroku."

Heroku is great in that it commoditizes the hosting. It's nice for a first side project but if you're planning on doing multiple side projects I would recommend Linode.com (or some other VPS). For just $20/month you can host as many apps as you want (which is a lot if your side projects don't get much traffic). For Heroku, it's $36 per month per app, isn't it? I have a side project on their free version but it seems that if it gets two web requests at the same time it's too much traffic and an error page is displayed for the user.

Using a VPS like Linode.com is a lot more work but it's actually a plus because you get to increase your skills while having fun. :)