the real advantage of Heroku or Engine Yard?

I've ready some posts regarding the Heroku or Engine Yard for Rails3. When I look at their price, they are pricey comparing t开发者_开发技巧o a regular VPS or even a entry dedicated server. Besides flexible billing and easy vertical scaling, what are real advantage of using them? If I have ability to maintain the server. Thanks.

For me, the advantage is speed and simplicity.

Since I just want to focus on my apps, it's a convenience to have a managed platform that I can quickly push application to. This relieves the up-front headache of setting up a server, DB, managing URLs, etc...

Yes, they're more pricey, but that's the price you pay for the convenience of not having to deal with servers. If you want to put together a site in 10sec, you can. (Check out Toto: https://github.com/cloudhead/toto)

Another very nice feature of these PAAS companies is that they offer out-of-the-box support for many different setups. Different versions of rails are all supported.

Heroku seems to be more focused on total convenience, while Engine Yard functions more like a service that sets up servers for you that you can work on yourself. (I've not used Engine Yard for production apps, only tested them out. Please correct me if I'm wrong...)

Heroku also offers plugins, which further simplify things like mailservers, backups, logging, etc...

If you're looking for long-term cheapness, yes, look elsewhere. There are a lot of really good solutions available. But that's just not the target market for these companies.

Loren