at the end of the day, if you have a service that other people/businesses/clients rely on, that they need 24/7 up time, then you really need to have a plan B that is not on heroku or aws. a REAL disaster recovery plan needs to be thought out and implemented. if you dont want your users to see the "there is a problem with this app" on heroku, then its your job to figure out that plan B is. If you cant afford it a plan B, then well, tough shits. as someone that has worked in the hosting business for years on the operations side, its also the responsibility of the client to plan that scenario where your primary host is not reachable (regardless if its an application level issue, network or power outage). the hosting company can only build so many N+1 backups (network/power/etc) as they can afford/physically fit. you can buy all the load balancing you want, redundant web servers and database servers. if you arent hosting in a secondary place and your primary host fails, all those redundant servers you are paying for arent going to mean a damn thing.