I've installed the DNN VWD starter kit and I can create a dnn site inside VWD. Everything works fine without doing any modification. Now I want to use the uploading feature inside VWD to upload my DNN site to a web host. It uploads fine. When I try the URL from the browser I get the following error page:

An error has occurred while establishing a connection to the server. When connecting to SQL Server 2005, this failure may be caused by the fact that under the default settings SQL Server does not allow remote connections. (provider: SQL Network Interfaces, error: 26 - Error Locating Server/Instance Specified)

Kinda makes sense, but I'm not sure how to fix this. Do I need to make a change to the web.config? 

FIG:

I think you are running into a little bit of confusion that many people with some ASP.Net experience run into when getting started with DNN.  That is okay, let's review.

You DO NOT need the DNN Starter Kit to setup a DNN site for production, you only need the Install Package.  This follows the idea of "XCopy Deployment" as commonly used with .Net applications.  Notice that the Started Kit is intended for those that need to setup a DNN module development environment.  But even if you are developing modules, you should use the Install Package for production and then install your new modules in the usual way.  The Install Package is a precompiled version of DNN, so there is no need for you to have Visual Studio or Visual Web Dev Express to roll out a DNN site.

Now, to answer you question on modifications needed for the Web.config file, yes, you probably need to make changes to it according to your production server environment.  Most likely the SQL Server connect strings need to be adjusted.  You need to check with your host server admin how the SQL Server environment is setup.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that you'd probably need to add new aliases to your portals if you were using something like "localhost/dotnetnuke" on your dev PC and on the production server need to be www.realdomain.com for instance.

Hope this helps.

Carlos