Heroku is still a great choice if you're willing to pay to never think about infrastructure.
On the other hand if you're willing to ask for help there are plenty of freelance IT admins who would set up a digital ocean box with the DIY equivalent of Heroku.
Strongly agree. I loved AWS Lambda both for pricing and for developer convenience/efficiency, but managing the network infrastructure beneath it finally irked me too much, so I switched to pushing a Docker container to Heroku and haven't looked back. I am tempted to believe that a lot of teams might be forcing themselves into over-engineering/overkill to jumping right to AWS where it's not needed.
I have read similar comments to the ones here about scaling and cost, so I might bump into that at some point.
I would not recommend this unless you hire these people for a regular maintenance role.
Leaving a box with no monitoring and no on-site skill capable of fixing it is a bad idea. That box will explode at some point and it's going to explode at the worst possible moment, and you'll loose tons of business (and/or data) while you scramble to get someone to repair it.
Unless you have people ready to jump in and fix it should it break, don't risk it and just let Heroku handle it.
Not trying to be snarky but... how is it cheaper to hire a freelance IT person to set up something for you, and help you when it breaks/changes, than $7/mo for Heroku?
Absolutely. We went from free tier to about 100/month in nearly no time with Heroku. It’s worth it though. Heroku takes care of all sorts of stuff, and that fee is still cheaper than hiring a sys admin for a small business.
That is quite literally the price you pay for convenience. In many cases, that's a very rational tradeoff - your time is better spent on developing and marketing your app than dealing with devops. If your Heroku bill is a relevant business problem, then you're probably grossly under-charging for your app.
I think the main competition for Heroku these days is AWS and GCP. The workflow for deploying directly to managed cloud services has improved drastically over the last few years, so you might not need the niceties that Heroku offer.
On the other hand if you're willing to ask for help there are plenty of freelance IT admins who would set up a digital ocean box with the DIY equivalent of Heroku.