[hnzix]

AWS is infrastructure as a service (IaaS). You need to worry about load balancers, backup scripts, firewalls etc. Ie you need a plausible sysadmin to run it. Even Elastic Beanstalk requires some sysadmin.

Heroku is platform as a service (PaaS). It abstracts away the complexity of AWS. The base cost is more expensive than raw AWS but you don't need to source and pay for a sysadmin.

AWS, Heroku and DO aren't "better" than each other, they serve different use cases.

[serverQuestion]

I have been dreaming of running my own heroku like interface on a DO droplet. Just for small sites, side projects and such.

With heroku you need to pay to keep things running, though sadly with DO you need to do a lot of sysadmin work to keep things running.

[jdance]

After failing with Heroku we migrated to using Dokku on DO. And yes it is more work to do it ourselves, I didn't want to do that but here we are :) It was not a lot of work, dokku is really nice, but it was/is some work. I was hoping for almost no sysadmin work but that didn't happen.

[WrtCdEvrydy]

Caprover's probably the closest I've experienced, but there was still a bit to do.

[WrtCdEvrydy]

What... no. Install Caprover or Flynn or any of a dozen systems that provide Heroku-like functionality.

[slig]

Have you tried Dokku?