[forgingahead]

Agree on Heroku as well - the cognitive overhead they help take care of is well worth the money. There are other commenters saying "but it's expensive!", but your comparison should be Heroku vs. a Devops person (or yourself), not Heroku vs. <cloud_service_that_you_manage_yourself>.

My one complaint is that their support seems to have gotten worse over the years - they used to have great support engineers across the board, but have hired poorly recently, specifically in off-shore markets, so depending on what time you send in a ticket request, you may get someone who doesn't fully read your ticket or comprehend the situation, and just fires back a canned reply.

This usually gets solved if there is enough back-and-forth as they then seem to escalate it properly, but I have noticed that the initial reply to support tickets are not as good as they used to be.

[systemvoltage]

It takes me about 2 hours to setup docker container + Github pipeline. I don't see why this is difficult. I am not saying go all out and manage your kubernetes cluster. I am saying that packaging your application in a docker container and running it in a VM is pretty straight forward.

[ornornor]

Heroku also handles databases, backing them up, etc. And scaling up or down.

[danjac]

DigitalOcean also has managed databases+backups. I'm not sure how it compares on price/reliability though.