[jyap]

"As traffic to the status site began to ramp up, we increased the number of dynos running from 8 to 64 and finally 90."

Wait, why isn't there some caching layer? eg. Generate a static page or use Varnish.

This part makes no sense at all.

At most you're then firing up another 5 dynos (or none) to handle the traffic. 90 is ridiculous.