If you wish to answer a question, then answer it. No need to post a comment. But before doing so, ensure that your answer truly does actually provide a real answer to the question. If it doesn't, the answer will be deleted.

FYI, this is happening to me as well on the iOS app.

...all that to say there's nothing wrong at all with using services like Heroku. Not at all. I've been a sysadmin for 15 years, and even I use Heroku from time to time. I bring up the terminology thing because words are important, both to help yourself get your head around things, but even more importantly to help your customers understand what the situation is, and to be able to explain better to others how your application is being hosted, for instance as you did in your original question.

You should be careful with your terminology. You don't have "a server" you have a managed service, provided by Heroku, wherein your application can be deployed and executed. Likewise, you haven't been "managing your server". You've been managing your application, as deployed on Heroku's server. Yes, you have access to run a very restricted set of operations on the systems that are running your application, but that should not be conflated with actually managing the server.

Don't get hung up on the restarting thing. It's just a benchmark of sorts to determine if one is truly managing the system in question or is merely using it.

@RailsKiddie Could you, for instance, install auditd and configure it as needed to catch and research something like this? No. Could you run a packet capture on the server? No. You have very limited access to the server that's running your application, and thus, again, are a user of the system. Bear in mind that similar questions from users of Google App Engine, Parse (RIP), etc are also asked and closed on a fairly frequent basis. We're not just picking on you here.

@MikeyT.K. This exact thing happened with the OP's question. This person thought it was necessary, for "security" reasons, to censor their RFC1918 addresses. This of course makes it impossible to understand network topology. Even after noting this to the OP and recommending that they un-censor their IPs and also provide subnet masks, they failed to do that. I was trying to help, but the OP thought (incorrectly) that providing the additional information was not necessary. So, the question stayed closed for this and other reasons.

@MikeyT.K. As I said below, if a non-professional can write a well-researched, reasonably-scoped question about systems they have full control over, then they'll likely be left open here. The problem is that there are very few non-professionals that even have the ability to write a good question about this sort of thing. They try, but fail to understand even the most basic of concepts and/or fail to be able to explain things clearly, even when asked for specific clarification. Thus, their question gets closed.

OK folks, look at trueCamelType's answer above. He calls out the chief difference between SF and its sister sites. SF is by professional admins, for professional admins. Now, if someone comes along and asks a well-researched, well-articulated, reasonably-scoped question and they're not a professional, the question will usually stick around. In the OP's case, though, the question had several strikes against it, one of which was that it was not a professional environment. The others are 1) Mis-use of VMware licenses and 2) Lack of thorough troubleshooting into the problem.

@peterh I guess the nuance there is that one has full administrative permissions on the subsystem they are asking about.

OK everyone, let's keep the comments on-topic here. This is not the venue to debate how the OP has designed their solution.