Heroku is good because they take sysadmin/DBA headaches away from you, but I wouldn't call them cheap.
My take on this is that if you want or need to run your own database with a large amount of storage, there are three solutions:
- run it in house, which means you now need a redundant link to the internet, server class machines (redundant power supply), etc, etc, etc... Unlikely unless you already have your own data centre
- use a VM to which you can add storage (EC2, google, etc...). That is expensive (0.1$/GiB) but typically very reliable (they use redundant physical storage), and flexible (you can move your storage around, rebuild VMs etc...).
- use a colo site, or a rent a cheap physical. You get a lot of space for a very reasonable price, but have all the headaches of a physical (storage is only as redundant as you make it, no hardware mirroring/raid'ing, if the storage fails, you've lost your OS as well, and now have to restore from backup, changing OS means renting a second physical, install, transfer data, etc...).
Fair enough, thanks for explaining that. Seems like the EC2-like route makes the most sense if you're most budget and manpower constrained, even though the performance will be comparatively pretty abysmal.
The only thing I have been able to find are physical hosts, with all the issues associated with them (40$ for 2 x 1 TB disk at http://ovh.com).