[elliotlarson]

I started messing with Heroku back when they were trying to be an online Rails editor. When they started getting more seriously into hosting I was relieved to have a company dedicated to making Rails hosting easy. But, every time I tried to host a professional project with them I ended up leaving early on because of slow performance, high pricing, and the fact that their system had limits that there was always some third party around to help solve for a fee. The fees add up. I started rolling my own configurations with Chef. It was painful. Then I tried Ansible, and it was easier to use, but I was still responsible for devops. I've come to realize that I will never be good at devops. I'm spending all of my time in application code. It just isn't what I do. And, most of my professional projects really don't have scale issues. They're mostly apps with small user bases that run great on a couple of servers. There's a sweet spot for Heroku here. Yeah, they're still slow, they still have limitations, they're still expensive... but on the low end of their price scale, it's hard to beat not having to worry about devops. (Saw a reference to https://render.com in the comments. Maybe I'll give them a try.)