[snacktaster]

I don't know the details of how Heroku implements their hosted postgres service, but I'm _guessing_ that it's just a bunch of PG servers running on EC2 instances. There's probably a lot of CPU stealing "noisy neighbors" going on. But yeah, I've also experienced Heroku's PG databases being dog-slow compared to RDS for the same workloads.

[mixmastamyk]

They're probably using older or cheaper instance types. By not upgrading while charging the same or more over time, one can skim more profit.