A dedicated server at hetzner is about 30-35 dollars / month. That will get you a ryzen5/64 gigs/512 RAID-1 NVME on linux.

Heroku at that spec really starts to hit the wallet.

More than engouh for a lot of applications. Hell, I ran a E-commerce company with 20MM USD/year in sales on a dedicated server from 2005-2013.

Most things are plain vanilla and rock stable. I can go from new server to running my first services is less than an hour. Ansible or cloud-init go a long way to turning my pets into cattle, so to speak.

I spend nearly no time "managing it" -- I have grafana dashboards and Hetzner monitoring the critical things.

Happy to share more.