For small stuff Heroku is great. We're an ad agency doing a bunch of small sites and Facebook games with little traffic (small marketplace). The cost is spread out over many clients and it works out for everyone. That's the opposite of the scenario this article presents: one API with one database and one party that pays the bill. We have very low hardware requirements, but would like to manage as little as possible.

PHP/MySQL shared hosting was always the best way to get a site up quickly (cheap, reliably and fast). Now finally there is a comparable hosting option for simple stuff written in Python/Ruby/..?