I don't think so. Heroku is a PaaS (Platform as a Service). You can connect with SSH but everything is mostly set-up for you already but I don't have Heroku so I'm not sure. A VPS (Virtual Private Server) is just a remote computer typically with a bare Linux installation, and you build up from there and install what you need, Ruby, Node, PHP... Check https://www.digitalocean.com/, they're pretty popular.