I can certainly see the point where Heroku comes out wildly overpriced for certain types of hobby-scale apps. I've seen several people recommend dedicated servers via Linode or DigitalOcean instead, which has it's own pluses and minuses - gotta maintain the server, but for a pretty low price, you get something powerful enough to run a 24/7 server + database + whatever other odds and ends your app needs, as long as the demands aren't too high.

I'm wondering how AWS compares, though - running a dedicated, manually managed EC2 instance or ElasticBeanstalk. Seems like you could get your own server, and still have little barrier to scaling as high as anybody could ever need at the touch of a button. Anybody have much insight on that?