Why amazon ec2 is better than heroku : it's the price

Compared with a ronin database instance = 200$

For 57.6$ per month if we calculate month=30 days on ec2 i can get a small ubuntu linux instance with 1.7G of ram with a lot more than 10.000 rows

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/

After that installing a firebird database can be easy if i choose a ubuntu instance

Next you can add nginx/django just for fun

For backup there are many python scripts to backup to s3/ebs snapshots