We're moving our app over from heroku. I have our web servers setup here now but I really want to get off of heroku's postgres. Does anyone have any insight as to what would be a better solution between running a postgres instance on linode and running one through amazon? I'm a bit nervous about managing my own database installation which is why I'm leaning towards RDS, but I can't tell if the price/performance difference is worth it.

If you're hosting your application servers at Linode, use a local database server hosted at Linode. If you're hosting your application servers at Amazon, use a local database server hosted at Amazon. It's not a good idea to have your database sitting on the other side of the public Internet. For performance reasons, if nothing else. I remember a guy came by here a while ago complaining of terrible database performance, and it turned out he was running his database server on a dedicated box somewhere else and trying to connect his linodes to them.

Postgres is a nice, civilized database. I wouldn't worry too much about running it yourself. Just make sure you have a backup and disaster recovery plan in place that you've tested.