> Under what traditional model would you spawn off an entire server instance for such a minor function
I think that's the point - would you rather run your own VPS and manage the logs/errors from a cron job? Or simply write code that conforms to their contract and not worry about logs, errors, and whether it can scale or will fail to restart itself.
Or have another vps/server with spare capacity where this makes sense to run as well? In most cases, such a function will be closely related to other functions and can be grouped with them.
I think that's the point - would you rather run your own VPS and manage the logs/errors from a cron job? Or simply write code that conforms to their contract and not worry about logs, errors, and whether it can scale or will fail to restart itself.