2 years ago I taught myself how to code and design. Figuring out how to set up my environment alone almost killed me. There were just so many cryptic commands that had to be done that weren't exactly english. Then I found the Rails 1 click installer, and it literally did just that. Next I saw the beauty of git push heroku master. Now my page was on the web. It was amazing. To seasoned programmers it might not seem that difficult, but to those who are entering this new world, a few steps and a wiki can start to get confusing, especially if something goes wrong or the person skips a step. Overall the environments for code still have bad UX and I can't wait till someone makes it as easy as the 1 click experience I had.
Ok but what I'm saying is that the UIs for the VPSs are really simple and some of them actually have a way to select a VM with Node already installed or automatically run a script that installs it. Its actually easier than Heroku.
Also if you just had a good bash script from somewhere, that would be easier than Heroku too.
Just basically saying that the right script or server image is all you need rather than paying twice or 10x as much money for something you can't control.
