I totally agree for experiments, but for long-term stuff, like your website or anything else you want to stay up, once you configure it then it stays configured - it's actually not 30 minutes, more like several hours the first time you do it, but after that you don't have to touch it again for months. The only thing that has to happen periodically are security updates, but you can configure it to update itself, you then configure Pingdom to send you alerts in case the server is down, then you're worry free.

Granted, Heroku's ease of use is totally kick-ass.