Yes, servers should be maintained by people who know what they're doing. This means you need to hire a third party (e.g. Engine Yard) or learn how to admin a server.

I'm not knocking Heroku -- you're right, it definitely looks like it'd be great for people just getting into web development or programming in general. I bet that most people who get into programming these days start off thinking "I want to make a website", and tools like this cater to that crowd.