[benfwirtz]

Good analysis, but why production on a dedicated server and development on PaaS? Intuitively, I would do it the other way around, to make sure I don't have to do the admin on a production system (source of failure) and can scale the production system with the click of a button (which I'm happy to pay slightly more on). Where is my mind going wrong? ;)

[kunley]

The case for dev/CI on PaaS would be when one initially can't decide which toys (components, web stacks, libraries, CI servers, ...) he needs, provided that PaaS vendor has many options to choose from (heroku has). So one can test & trash different solutions quickly - this often happens at the initial stage of a startup. When settled with some infrastructure idea I advice to install production on a dedicated server for the reasons mentioned above: price & stability, keeping in mind that buying & setting up the horizontal scaling is postponed for about a year. At this moment there's choice - conntinue to use PaaSed environments for dev (I can understand the sentiment) or trash them completely and prepare a dev machine as well (better IMO).

YMMV