VPS and Dedicated Servers certainly work and are usually going to be more economical, but then you are going to have to deal with all of the setup/maintenance tasks that Heroku abstracts away from you.
I'd venture that there are far more people using Heroku for its easy deployment and management than its ability to scale quickly and easily.
>I'd venture that there are far more people using Heroku for its easy deployment and management than its ability to scale quickly and easily.
That's well and good but I wouldn't be so quick to pass off on dedicated. A simple 50-100 line fabric script that takes 30 minutes to write can manage your custom deployment for you. And guess what, your next project will be even easier to deploy because of that same script.
If the only reason to use Heroku or other of its kind is easy deployment - maybe we just need better deployment apps that can work seamlessly across servers.
> If the only reason to use Heroku or other of its kind is easy deployment - maybe we just need better deployment apps that can work seamlessly across servers.
Heroku certainly thought so. That's why they got a few dozen brilliant programmers into the same building and made it happen.
Of course, with a ~$5M/year burn rate, it's probably also why they charge money for their services.
(making up numbers here, but assume 30 developers at $150K => ~$4.5M so I would guess I'm laughably low)
I'd venture that there are far more people using Heroku for its easy deployment and management than its ability to scale quickly and easily.