I switched from Heroku to AWS, then eventually back to Heroku. Heroku to AWS was for cost reasons (cut monthly costs by roughly 35%) but wasn't enough savings to justify hiring a devops person. As soon as there were too many issues I didn't know how to fix (setting up everything Heroku offers was hard and likely done wrong, which made ongoing maintenance some level of hell), I switched back to Heroku where the lack of devops needs basically paid for itself.
This is very, very true. One of our customers described it really well βThe nightmare of DevOps kept us from managing AWS directly, but with TinyStacks we can scale a billion+ requests a day in audio advertising leveraging the full power of AWS.β
