I'm moving my DNN 5.6 to a hosting company and ran into problems configuring the hosting environment. I would be grateful if someone can give me a hint to what I did wrong.

I'm running DNN 5.6 on a computer A with a SQL Server 2008R2 Express database on another machine over the internet; so my DNN installation and the database are not on the same local network. I have this working just fine. I copied my DNN directory to the hosting environment using FTP, I double checked for any FTP transfer errors. In both cases DNN is located in the root not in a subdirectory. I have both sites listed in DNN as portal aliases. I'm running Windows7 + IIS 7.5 and my hoster Windows Server 2008 with IIS 7.x (I didn't verify the if it is 7.0 or 7.5). I can configure my IIS at the hosting company remotely. I gave read & write access on the root and all (sub)folders and files in the target site. I verified with my hoster that that are no restrictions e.g. firewalls set on outgoing connections.

My own copy launches DNN with http://localhost/ but when I go to http://www.mydomain.com/ I get http://www.mydomain.com/Install/UnderConstruction.htm page with the This site is currently Unavailable - Please check back later message. If I go to the page http://www.mydomain.com/Install/install.aspx?mode=upgrade I get the message  Error Installing DotNetNuke - Current Assembly Version: 5.6.0 - ERROR: Could not connect to database specified in connectionString for SqlDataProvider.

If the DNN error message actually describes the problem it shouldn't be the connection string but something else.

Because my browser and IIS run on the same machine and there may be some implicit permissions I have within DNN I reconfigured my set up so I can launch my own copy of DNN externally from within my browser as http://My_External_IPAddress:Portnr/. My IIS and my browser should both be considering it as internet traffic and no longer as some internal local network connection. And this worked just fine too.

I suspect that there is some difference between my IIS and the hosted-IIS and/or setting in DNN that needs to be adjusted to get it to work but I just don't see it. I didn't see any IIS settings with my hosted site that could explain this behavior but there a quite a few so I may have missed one.

Am I sure if I can connect? Not really.

I can copy&paste the connection string, user name and password for the remote sql server from the web.config into the <Connect to Server> dialog box to open the database on the remote server in SQL Server Management Studio.
The server name looks like this
tcp:remote_ip_address,port_nr\SQLExpress

The connection string entry in the web.config looks like this
<add name="SiteSqlServer" connectionString="Data Source=tcp:remote_ip_address,port_nr\SQLExpress;Initial Catalog=name_of_my_database;User ID=name_of_sql_user;Password=my_password" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" />


My dnn user (the same one I used to log on with copied&pasted credentials) has the sysadmin role at the server level and with user mappings I made him db_owner for the database. This user can remotely modify fields, add and delete tables etc. So the connection string and the permissions seem to be OK.

Also the DNN at the hoster is an identical copy of my localhost installation including the web.config with the connection string for the remote database server that should also be the same because I want to use the same remote database in the hosted DNN.

Of course the IIS and Windows environment at my hoster is not identical to my own. But I have no reason to doubt their statement that they do not block outgoing traffic on other ports.

All this gave me reason to believe there may be a unique combination of Windows, IIS and/or DNN settings that conflict.

As for question: Are you positive that the machine where your hosted web server is located can connect successfully to the remote SQL Server?:  I will need to try that out with a simple test program.