After migrating an entire startup infrastructure from Heroku to AWS I'm even more against Heroku given how easy it is to use something like Elastic Beanstalk to do the same thing without many of the same downsides.
I've been burned by Heroku, though, so I have a strong negative opinion.
Now that said I totally relate to having strong negative opinions after being burned. I've got a few orgs like that too. What did they do for you?
Edit: nevermind I should have refreshed. You already answered in a sibling comment
We recently got bit (not quite burned) with the load balancers in the Common Runtime being shared across all apps.
Some piece of malware was associated with one of the IPs of Heroku's load balancers. One of our customers ended up blocking one of our servers associated to that IP because of it. We did some research and we even think we know what app caused it (it's someone's app they host on Heroku), and we don't think it should be flagged as malware, but either way... some other app in Heroku could be truly doing bad things and we would then get our server blocked again.
Heroku's advice was to put up a CDN in front of their load balancers, which has worked for now. But that's extra cost and system complexity just to get around a limitation of Heroku.
We did confirm a Heroku Private Space would eliminate this, since we'd get our own set of IPs for the Private Space's load balancers. But that comes with extra cost, and perhaps even limiting which add-ons we can use in the Private Space.
So although we've generally been happy with Heroku, we are concerned with some technical limitations, like this important (to us) one.
For reference, we migrated to new t4g instances on AWS and received about a 100x performance improvement for a similar (sometimes cheaper) price than Heroku. We are also able to connect to our company VPC and use private resources partitioned elsewhere in AWS (e.g. a redis cluster that costs the same as Heroku with far fewer limitations).
The downside is obviously configuration and learning AWS. Thankfully, we are pretty well versed in AWS here.
Looking at prices is definitely something I’m going to be doing in the short-to-medium term here. We’ve grown our Heroku bill for years, but I’m not entirely sure what all they take care of that RDS or Aurora wouldn’t also handle.
We currently don’t have anyone who is a dedicated sysadmin, so that’s one thing to keep in mind. We’ve been able to rely on shared sysadmin responsibilities here and there, and have Heroku take care of monitoring if our database has somehow “degraded.” But I do wonder if when Heroku identifies that a database needs to be updated, if they’re really just rebranding something AWS does automatically with RDS. I’m just not sure.
You need double your number of typical connections to support rolling, combine that with the large price jumps and low connection counts on the plans and it becomes very expensive just to have something that should be standard in a modern PaaS platform. This is but one example.
I'm just complaining to complain lol.
Render is close, but they’re still missing a lot of important details that makes deploying Rails apps as easy as Heroku. Instead they kind of throw the manual at you and expect you to read a tutorial.