[Vince]

While it is generally possible to use an off-site database, this is not recommended because this is incredibly slow compared to a database on the local network. All the data needs to be transmitted over the Internet (which is also less secure). If a query takes 10 milliseconds on a local machine, it can easily take 100 milliseconds on a remote machine because of the ping. That is is a modest ping of 45 milliseconds (back and forth) and is already 10 times slower.