I don't use services like Heroku as deployment infrastructure. They are amazing but I have my reasons.
- I don't use a service or software unless I know how it works
- After I figured out how Heroku works, I have my own small automated deployment system which works fine
- Heroku costs me 10x more than my own automated deployment process
- I prefer to publish the binaries not sources
I also need to run my own MongoDB instance, in which I store the files as well as other data. This way, Heroku costs me about 80$/mo for a service which I could build by myself for about 8$/mo.
When I moved to Scala I was new to Linux as well. Deploying a standalone web application was not an easy task for me, especially with that IIS background.
But I did a very well job IMO :D and finally (after about a year) I published it on GitHub. It's not perfect and need some polishing, but it works.