[michaelbuckbee]

In making a selection like this you need to separate the deploy UX (git push heroku master) from the underlying service.

Things like dokku, etc are great at providing the UX and generally really solid.

However, much of the benefit of Heroku is that they handle some/much of the underlying sysadmin tasks you'd otherwise need to worry about. It's easy to discount that as it's mostly invisible until there's a serious problem.

A middle ground between putting dokku onto a VPS is perhaps Amazon's Elastic Beanstalk service combined with Amazon RDS which provides you a big chunk of the functionality (albeit in a less slick wrapper).