I've run both cloud and non-cloud applications. In my experience, you won't get 99.95% annual uptime over 5 years without a full-time sysadmin, the ability to provision a complete offsite infrastructure and fail over to it within a few hours, and a backup/restore process that you rigorously test every month or so.
You generally won't get all that for $2K to $3K a month. Sure, you can drop $15K on an expensive database server, and co-locate it somewhere. But that only works until somebody takes a backhoe to your fiber, your RAID controller fails catastrophically, somebody pwns your production server, your sysadmin flakes out, or you discover that your backup scripts have been broken for months.
Realistically, if you're only spending $2-3K per month on hosting and administration, you'll eventually experience one or more of the above, and your site may be down for a day or more.
This isn't to say that I'm happy about Heroku's long downtime. One of my clients was offline almost as long as you were. But I'm pleased that Heroku recognizes just how badly they screwed up, and that they're taking the two most important steps they can to prevent a recurrence: multi-region support, and continuous backups for everyone. Multi-region support may not be sufficient to protect against cascading Amazon outages, but it's a good start.
You generally won't get all that for $2K to $3K a month. Sure, you can drop $15K on an expensive database server, and co-locate it somewhere. But that only works until somebody takes a backhoe to your fiber, your RAID controller fails catastrophically, somebody pwns your production server, your sysadmin flakes out, or you discover that your backup scripts have been broken for months.
Realistically, if you're only spending $2-3K per month on hosting and administration, you'll eventually experience one or more of the above, and your site may be down for a day or more.
This isn't to say that I'm happy about Heroku's long downtime. One of my clients was offline almost as long as you were. But I'm pleased that Heroku recognizes just how badly they screwed up, and that they're taking the two most important steps they can to prevent a recurrence: multi-region support, and continuous backups for everyone. Multi-region support may not be sufficient to protect against cascading Amazon outages, but it's a good start.