I honestly never truly understood the value of services like engineyard and heroku (more accurately i guess i think i understand the value but am surprised by why so many would need it). It is quite a price premium you pay to save yourself from doing something that is pretty simple -- deploying rails, at the cost of losing full control. When I had to use engineyard for a client, I was really shocked by the prices and while they were really fast on support I just found it tedious to have to get someone else to try something that doesn't fit entirely into their 'optimized' stack of things.