I agree, I love EC2 personally, their mini server plan(or whatever its called) is great for keeping a production version of a project running while its still in an initial phase (very low user base) and then you can scale easily without having to learn anything new as you can run basically things the same as you do locally (I run Ubuntu locally and mainly develop for Tomcat so it makes it really easy to keep things the same on there). I looked at Heroku but as soon as I realized it would be rather expensive just to get regular datbase access (so I could run straight SQL if I needed to, etc) it was out.