Heroku

Funny you should ask.

I have been in tough times financially, and just spun up 4 free-hosted apps on Heroku as a way to archive my work as a portfolio for future employment.

So far so good. When the free dynos are sleeping, the delay is very significant. For something that costs $0, though, can't complain.

Certainly not good for full production, although I can't comment on the performance improvements of paid dynos. Heroku paid service appears to have great potential for a rapid, collaborative, team, who don't want to spend human capital on server management.

Heroku could be very useful for prototyping, and quick sparks of inspiration you wish to share with others. You can rapidly get your code up and running on a shareable live environment in minutes, without the hassle of setting up and managing a VPS.

Though it's a couple of years old, @mattstauffer has a series of blog posts about using Laravel on Heroku you may want to check out. I can't comment on whether or not the info is outdated but they do have full composer support and seem to be fairly simple to set up. The rails community has used Heroku for years. Easy to scale, I'm sure it could handle any production app as well.