I literally just discovered Dokku (https://github.com/progrium/dokku) yesterday - a "Docker powered mini-Heroku in around 100 lines of Bash". You can roll your own PaaS infrastructure on your own VMs.
It took a few hours, but I was able to get my Heroku-based Rails app up and running on a Dokku droplet (to be fair, the most time-consuming part was getting the SSH keys right and figuring out that I needed a domain name - e.g., couldn't just set it up with a droplet's IP address - at least not with the DigitalOcean tutorial's instructions: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-...).
Serious, non-sarcastic question: So now you have your own mini Heroku on your own VM somewhere. Is the probability of downtime now smaller than it was on heroku? It seems to be it would be higher...
Yes, but now you can at least plan/schedule downtime according to your particular needs, and unscheduled downtime is at least a little more transparent to you. Sounds like that's what the original article wanted, in any case.
That's a legitimate benefit, although I was suggesting it's offset by the greater chance of something going wrong when you are managing your own servers, especially if you're not an expert sysadmin. I would assume Heroku instances are secured better than a box you're locking down yourself.
It took a few hours, but I was able to get my Heroku-based Rails app up and running on a Dokku droplet (to be fair, the most time-consuming part was getting the SSH keys right and figuring out that I needed a domain name - e.g., couldn't just set it up with a droplet's IP address - at least not with the DigitalOcean tutorial's instructions: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-...).