Heroku offers a great hosting platform that abstracts away most of the system administration tasks inherent in running an app. I have generally been very happy hosting productions apps in Heroku and have managed to do very well with it’s platform and it’s available add-ons to increase functionality. I really like the way the handle Postgres databases, which makes things like followers, clones and backups a simple 1-off command.

UPDATE: These benchmarks where updated in 2013 and 2014.