I'm thinking of deploying a small Rails app on Heroku. In an effort to save money, I'd like my app to use an external database (to which I have free access), rather than a Heroku-hosted database. The trouble is that the free database only accepts local connections. To access it from Heroku, I'd need to do so via an SSH tunnel.
Is it possible for a Heroku app to persist its data in an external DB accessed via SSH? If so, how?
(For bonus points, here's a second question: is this a good idea? On the one hand, this scheme would save me from paying for a Heroku database. On the other hand, it means having to encrypt all my database traffic. I imagine that this would massively slow down my web dynos, and reduce the number of requests they can serve. Would the money I save on the database get used up paying for more dynos? Am I likely to come out ahead by doing this?)