Your web service is stateless - for those cases it's fine. However with this model, you are offloading all your state to another layer - likely the database lay

Your web service is stateless - for those cases it's fine. However with this model, you are offloading all your state to another layer - likely the database layer. With Erlang (or rather, the Actor model), you can build state-full pieces of code that are also resilient to crashes that cascade across the entire system, by having a standard pattern of restarting individual actors from a known clean state through a clean supervisor hierarchy.