I've heard of it; for me, messing with a system (even once) isn't really fun, it just gets in the way of spending time on my code. I don't have a ton of projects and Heroku has a free tier for things that don't need 100% uptime, so it's worth the extra couple bucks for me

Edit: I see DigitalOcean has it available as a 1-click install. Do you get totally automatic updates/system management and everything with that?