On the SitePoint PHP blog today there's a new tutorial showing you how to run tasks "in the cloud" using PHP and the Iron Worker service.

In this article I’m going to show you how we can use IronWorker to run code in the Cloud, just as if it were being run inside our PHP application’s code. There are a number of advantages to running tasks in the cloud, for example: processor-intensive tasks can be offloaded from your web server, better fault tolerance and the execution of your code isn’t blocked waiting for long-running tasks

The tutorial uses a Ruby-based CLI tool and this PHP Package to setup and execute the tasks. They walk you through the creation of a first task script and help you create the ".worker" file it needs to execute. With the IronWorker PHP package, you can quickly create these workers and configure things like schedule, data to send or - as their last example shows - send emails directly from the worker.