I'm planning to move away from Heroku too, partly because of the routing system issues you mention in your article, but also because I want to sharpen my sysadmin fu. Have you considered https://www.cloud66.com/ because it seems like a nice tradeoff between going "bare metal all the way" and Heroku's comfy environment.
I've tried their service a few weeks ago, but they had a problem related to my particular Gemfile so I abandoned it for the moment. Their product is great and I'm sure they will iron out these small bugs, but for now it's not a valid option for me.
DigitalOcean recently became fully integrated with Cloud66.com just last week. It's a great way to easily spin up a new server, and echo's our mantra of simple cloud hosting.
Cloud66 is awesome I should say, they take the pain of having to do all the groundwork yourself, which is so freakin awesome ! Are there any similar providers to cloud66, apart from Heroku? (and Engineyard ofcourse)
