Heroku is expensive from a hosting perspective but cheap from a sysadmin cost perspective.
And it's this total cost of running a service (or at the very least the opportunity cost of not working on things essential to your business and the risk of your site getting screwed by somebody malicious) that I'm trying to convey.
For a business, $240/year to get a SSL terminating load balancer maintained by a dedicated security sysadmin team to sit in front of their app looks like a heckuva deal.
There is just so much work that is involved in keeping a system properly up and secure that unless you're valuing your time at near zero dollars an hour, or you have so much traffic and cash coming in that you can get a dedicated person to handle it Heroku makes monetary sense.
And it's this total cost of running a service (or at the very least the opportunity cost of not working on things essential to your business and the risk of your site getting screwed by somebody malicious) that I'm trying to convey.
For a business, $240/year to get a SSL terminating load balancer maintained by a dedicated security sysadmin team to sit in front of their app looks like a heckuva deal.
There is just so much work that is involved in keeping a system properly up and secure that unless you're valuing your time at near zero dollars an hour, or you have so much traffic and cash coming in that you can get a dedicated person to handle it Heroku makes monetary sense.