If you had a website with thousands of users that made calculations all day on site - would client side processing use significantly less server resources? I never thought of this and am curious…
For us, and we host all of our applications and services. We mix both client and server side to achieve a healthy balance. We tend not to push too much client side as by default each and every user runs their browsers in a multitude of different ways. Ie they may have extensions and plugins installed that are out of our control, poor connectivity, restrictive security policies, and a host of other factors beyond our control. Where as on the server side we make these choices. Important factors here are efficient database design and configurations, only push back data that is actually required to a specific user, quality queries which have been tuned and tweaked to provide the best performance, well configured services, cache what you can with a proxy, make use of CDN’s or create your own. Don’t run extensions server side you don’t really need. Spread the load by load balancing if you expect substantial user numbers. Break down your databases and don’t jumble everything in to one giant schema, segregate and distribute. Its a difficult question to answer as their can be so many unknowns client side, thus we really do prefer to make use of the hardware at our disposal server side. Server Connect is very efficient and its performance is very good if you are considerate with your Actions, ie really try not to overly complicate things, although SC handles everything fine its often the person creating the Actions that neglect the performance implications that may arise from overloaded steps contained within the Actions, its not Server Connect. Overall we would say spend time tweaking your queries, remove the totally unnecessary, test, refine, and test again. Always have resources left over and if you need to upgrade your server, don’t skimp in this regard. Shared hosting can be terrible even with the best providers. Akin to ADSL and being at the end of the street… If you can always go dedicated, or at least provide half again of what you may feel may be enough. Can never have enough memory. Opt for as much as you can afford. Keep your services up to date, update, backup. Keep on top of it all. Its a job in itself but knowing the back-end and your hosting environment can pay dividends in performance and security. Not sure if this helped but maybe something useful you can take away from the above… 
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