I would recommend trying dokku for thirty minutes. It's incredibly easy and once you use it you'll be a convert. I almost never do any maintenance and run dozens of services. All for the price of a VPS. It's very powerful and very inexpensive.

And by the way, dokku has support for cron jobs and everything else you indicated, all for free. Dozens of plugins that support every database. Git push almost any app and it will detect and build, just like heroku. It's so good.