Recent experiences with Heroku?

Hi all,

I went to a job interview yesterday for a very interesting new role; I would basically be starting and heading a new branch of the company with upcoming big projects and the company seems to be very keen to use Heroku a lot for the deployment.

I have been using own servers / VPS's for years (VPS.NET and especially Linode), so I have always had full control on what I could/needed to use, with basically no limits. But of course the overhead of the administration, while I have never had any real problems with it, is something that sometimes I would like to avoid to focus more on development etc. So in a way I like that this company is keen to use a PAAS provider.

I was just wondering however, how is Heroku doing these days? I've seen they've added a lot of addons etc, but I am wondering about performance and reliability as well. What's your experience with them so far? I am particularly interested about experiences with big projects with high traffic and perhaps a lot of backend processing.

Cost: it still looks to me like Heroku is more (or a lot more) expensive than running your own servers on Linode or similar; of course this is justified by the fact that the administration is taken care of for you. However I am wondering if you find anyway that the advantages of such a platform overcome the higher costs, in your case.

On a side note, have you experienced any big limitations or hiccups that have led you to move or consider a move out of Heroku for your projects?

Thanks a lot in advance for your insights.