> What pain is Heroku saving you to justify being 5x more expensive than Lightsail/Digital Ocean/Linode?
The pain of setting it up, applying security patches, making sure you set it up securely to begin with. The pain of having a mental model more complex than "the server is what I git push to."
> I probably have over 50 sites I'm currently hosting so using anything that much more expensive wont enter into consideration.
No one would argue someone in your position should use heroku. It's for people who are willing to pay to avoid sysadmin work... which is a lot of developers.
How does Heroku and other managed services perform updates that might contain breaking changes? Or do they only perform minor updates or security updates with no breaking changes?
My biggest fear with managed hosting and managed databases is being given too short of a window before they update.
tl;dr: You get a few choices of Ubuntu LTS releases, which they maintain for a long time (currently they still support 14.04, now nearly 5 years old). Or you can push Docker images, at which point the underlying OS is squarely back in your court — technically they must be applying kernel patches, but Linus is fairly religious about not breaking userland.
The pain of setting it up, applying security patches, making sure you set it up securely to begin with. The pain of having a mental model more complex than "the server is what I git push to."
> I probably have over 50 sites I'm currently hosting so using anything that much more expensive wont enter into consideration.
No one would argue someone in your position should use heroku. It's for people who are willing to pay to avoid sysadmin work... which is a lot of developers.