I just wouldn't recommend PaaS providers at all ("cloud" is not really the right term to use here), as you lose complete control over the environment. As far as I know, for example, Heroku does not have a persistent filesystem, so you're going to often have to do weird things to get third-party software to work, and there are many things you simply can't run at all. I help out a lot of people in #Node.js on Freenode, and PaaS services (whether production like Heroku or development like "Cloud IDEs") are a constant source of frustration and debugging issues.
There's plenty of Docker-based or Docker-inspired tools around that give you similar ease of deployment, eg.
dokku. There's also plenty of deployment management tools like Puppet and Chef.
I don't feel that PaaS services are really good for developers
at all - they seem to primarily benefit the PaaS operators themselves, and I have yet to see a convincing argument for them. As far as I can tell, they just create vendor lock-in and lure you in by making things look 'super easy' (conveniently glossing over the self-hosted equivalent options).
Now VPS providers that offer an API for instance creation - eg. DigitalOcean, Linode, ... - are a different story. There's a real usecase there, if a bit of an edgecase. Even those you probably won't need, though, unless you're building an application that requires heavy scaling early on.