linode vs amazon ec2 vs heroku for project with amazon s3

If you want to save the most money then I'd go with linode (Amazon ec2 might cost about the same though). With linode for $19.95/month you get 20gb of space where you can host your website and database. If you're using s3 then you can use most of the 20gb for your database. Not only that but on linode the addons that would cost you money on Heroku will be free (solr/sphinx, background jobs, email, etc). Compare this to Heroku where a 20gb shared database alone costs $15/month. Then you need to pay monthly if you want solr, background jobs, etc.

On linode it's free because you run and maintain your own virtual private server (VPS). Which brings me to one of the most important things to consider here, linode will save you money but it will cost you more time since you have to manage everything yourself.

For what it's worth, I am currently in the process of moving much of my hosting over from Heroku to Linode because of the costs involved and because as a rails developer I feel it's important to understand how to manage my own webserver.

There are a lot of other advantages to having your own VPS though. For example, hosting multiple website, creating multiple databases used by other web apps, your own email server, etc.

Update: April 2014

An even cheaper alternative to linode is digitalocean. Their cheapest plan is currently $5/month.

Just for a performance point of view, you'll get better performance if you use EC2 or Heroku since both are parts of the Amazon infrastructure (Heroku runs on EC2).

But it will only benefits if your pictures are processed by your Python server. If your pictures are served directly to the client, it will not have any impact to use Linode :)