My wife and I live in Atascadero, California (USA), a very pleasant city of about 25,000, half-way between San Francisco and Los Angeles. I work from home, lowering my overhead and saving my customers money.
In the late 80s, I began developing custom database applications — inventory-tracking, for example. In those days, the database resided on a computer in the client's office. After the World Wide Web was invented in the early 1990s, it became possible to install a database on a computer connected to the Internet, and access it from anywhere.
One example was the first website for the Atascadero Chamber of Commerce. That website allowed visitors to access information about the members of the Chamber, which was maintained in a database I created, and uploaded daily. The database resided in a data center miles away, a far cry from the norm only several years earlier.
I have moved on from websites driven by a database to websites that did not require a database. Now I spend my days making websites for local businesses for a monthly fee, and for several nonprofit organizations for free.