Yes. I wrote: "I was recently just one of those affected by a random issue!"

I don't notice any measurable latency. Heroku exposes their postgres instances directly on the public web (secured with a strong user/pass combo of course), so there's no difference, networking-wise. There's no additional reverse proxy or some tunnel to route through.

Heroku was the cheapest for the very small instance I needed.

The connections are made on-demand and are insanely fast.