This article seems to refer to v1 of the Pagodabox service which is due to be discontinued any day now in favour of their new v2 service. V2 makes several changes to the free tier, so that your web components require you log in to wake them up as opposed to auto-waking on access, and the base component specs are slightly different (less memory, for example).
I had an app running for several years and found it to be very easy to set up and administer. On the downside, though, there were frequent outages where my site was unavailable. The problems are supposedly resolved with v2 of the service.