I have a hosted site that works fine and would like to make a working local copy of it for testing.  I have created a separate clean DNN 3.1.1 site locally to make sure everything is functioning properly, i.e.SQL, IIS, permissions, etc..  This site works fine. 

For the local copy of the hosted site, I created a a new folder called C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\dnnlocal.  I also created a new SQL db that matches the name of the remote db I use for the site.  I created a user ID and password  for the db that matches the remote version.  I restored the hosted db to the local db file.  I did it this way so that the only change I needed to make would be to the server string <add key="SiteSqlServer" value="Server=****** in the web.config file.  I changed this to <add key="SiteSqlServer" value="Server=(local)

I then copied all the wwwroot files that I backed up from the remote server into the C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\dnnlocal folder.  Thinking this should work I then directed my browser to the site http://local/dnnlocal.  The response was the typical "cannot find server".  Changing the url to http://localhost/vinelocal I get HTTP 403 forbidden.  Prior to backing up the remotely hosted files I did add aliases for http://local/dnnlocal and http://localhost/vinelocal just to cover myself. 

Is there something I'm missing  here that is keeping this from working?  I've gone from local to host before with other sites and not had a problem but this is the first time I've gone hosted to local.

Thanks for you thoughts

The steps that you have done should work fine. You should also change the portalalias table to reflect the name of the localhost site name also

The following steps should be enough to move your application locally from a host:

1) copy all of your application files and folders from the host to a local directory, for example to c:\backupsites\ws\30apr06

2) Create an IIS entry for a new web application and point it to your directory created in step 1 - for example, localhost\ws30apr06

3) ensure the appropriate ASPNET application has security rights to the directory created in 1

4)  backup your production database and restore it locally

5) Create a local user to access the  local database

6) Change the web.config file to point to the new local database

7) Change the portalalias table entry in your local db for your main site to localhost\ws30apr06 

8) call up the site created in step 2 localhost\ws30apr06  in a browser and cross your fingers