We are experimenting with using SharedArrayBuffers and fetch to stream data, process it and fill it into a SharedArrayBuffer to then render with WebGL in the main thread. This has been working pretty great so far, but we'll have to wait for SharedArrayBuffer to get wider adoption.
Another thing was to offload tasks such as encoding GIF frames, which is also working pretty well.
I am the person who wrote the coderwall tip and I am sorry to hear that you feel like this. Especially because I did read your post a while ago, forgot about it and lost the link. I then just searched the GData docs and it's a documented feature. https://developers.google.com/gdata/samples/spreadsheet_samp... so I just spread something lesser known and didn't mean to "steal" anything.
He does have a point - but only if you want to do something more complex. If you need a JSON store that you can easily edit, I don't see a real advantage over Firebase - but once you want to incorporate, say Twitter login or some form of user authentication for your visitors, you're better off with Firebase, I would say.
When you don't want to run the servers yourself, you can use services like appfog and nodejitsu (there may be more like those), which run a CloudFoundry stack.
When you decide "Hey, I want to run it on my server(s)", then you just setup their open source stack (there's even an automatic setup process for this) on your server and you're running on your own machine.
I assume I can't do that with your service, can I?
Another thing was to offload tasks such as encoding GIF frames, which is also working pretty well.