QEWD is assumed by most people to only integrate with IRIS (or Cache) via a connection through IRIS's high-performance C interface. This requires QEWD (and its Node.js environment) to be installed and configured on the same machine as IRIS.
I'm frequently asked if QEWD can run on a separate server (or servers), and access IRIS (or Cache) over a network connection. The answer is yes it can, but the information on how to set it up in this way has been admittedly a bit tricky to discover.