Wow, We were one day from migrating away from Heroku because of this exact issue. I even made a custom Postgis build for dotcloud that also has extensions such as HStore. https://github.com/resmio/postgresql-on-dotcloud. Guess we have time to reconsider now.
I was using PostGIS for vehicle tracking at my last job. PostGIS made it really simple by allowing me to boil everything down to simple geometry. The performance is amazing. The CTO told me I was doing it wrong and I should be using some homebrew solution in the middle tier that would do a comparison of 2,000+ points each GPS update. Why reinvent the wheel? Let the experts handle the geospatial functions.
I have found a general lack of hosted PostGIS solutions and would have loved if this was around 6 months ago. Cartodb felt more like a mapping solution than a spatial database solution. SpacialDB (https://spacialdb.com/) was the only thing I could find, but their pricing plans vs storage limits didn't make sense (I was loading up OSM data - full dataset is really big). Ended up installing PostGIS on an EC2 instance manually, worked OK for development purposes but I would have never felt comfortable pushing that into production.
Is it possible to use this independently of other heroku services? We're on ec2, but this is a perfect fit.
Yes, https://postgres.heroku.com/ its a stand-alone service (thats run by Heroku), you don't need to be on the Heroku platform to use it.
Absolutely Heroku Postgres runs on top of EC2, if you want more details or have any questions you can reach out to me directly craig at heroku.com
Very nice! Their documentation on using it with Rails isn't very useful, but at least it points users to the right gem to install and use so they can read more about it on that github page.
Product manager for Heroku Postgres here, we've added a direct link to the gem docs. In general our hopes weren't to recycle the already good documentation out there, but reference it as that provides the right guide for actually taking advantage of functionality.
Wow, I was just recently looking for an alternative to Heroku because I noticed my GeoDjango app with PostGIS wouldn't run on it. Very good timing!
PostGIS has been available on Heroku for a little while now, you just had to be using a Ronin ($200/mo) plan or above. We were just about to roll out some geo-location features and were caught by this. To stage the new features we were forced to upgrade the staging database to Ronin level, which is absolute overkill.
I'll be pleased to knock that back down a few levels.