Yeah, DigitalOcean is a great alternative. I've been using it for my personal projects for a while now. I think they have a $5/month machine that can do wonders for a hobby project.
They do, I even used that professionally at a previous position.
$5-10/mo box with Dokku installed gave us a heroku-ish platform that could be scaled up if needed. The main downside being that you have to manage it yourself, but it really was quite easy for the scale we operated at. Can't speak for larger systems. But if you need a pretty simple, quick-deploy, small-ish-load servicing then it's a breeze.