[thibaut_barrere]

Here's my take:

-> if time is more precious than money, go with Heroku.

-> if money is more precious than time, go with Linode/SliceHost etc.

You can change your mind later on (depending on scale increase cash etc), or even mix-and-match (eg: your workers on Linode, your front-ends on Heroku).

Last point: some software (eg: sphinx) are not available on Heroku, and some others (eg: websolr) are quite costly compared to a roll-your-own setup.

[swombat]

If money is more precious than time but you have a need for reasonably beefy servers, go with Hetzner:

http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-pr...

[bmelton]

Maybe a dumb question, but my brief scan over there didn't see US Dollars or anything in American English. Do they have a US website, location or affiliate?