Edit: The obvious solution is to buy another dyno. This isn’t the issue, however. I wrote this post to show the unfortunate grey area in their pricing structure. It’s possible for low-traffic customers to pay a lot and still be subject to the poor performance that comes with a dyno being set to idle.

The greater underlying problem is there are some customers who only need one dyno (especially those of us who are running unicorn. My dyno can handle three times the number of requests) and we would rather spend a little extra on an upgraded database or some other addons.