I totally agree with you. I run five "small" web apps on one leased large VPS. Really cost effective! However, I had to set up my own auto deployments whenever I do a git commit/push, and worry about backups, etc. None of these sites individually get over 1000 visits a day, but they are all important to me. If I could pay Heroku $15/month for a single "always on" dyno (avoid loading requests) per application I would run everything there, and they would get $75/month for handling relatively few requests. Except for one Meteor app, all my apps are Clojure == small memory footprint and efficient. Cheap to host.