Connecting to a remote server

I am needing to move one of my apps to a remote secure server that I have. As I have never done this before what are the general things that I must do to make this happen. I changed my connect statement from "localhost" to the name of the server " <http://www.remoteservername.com> http://www.remoteservername.com" and received an error that I could not connect, try again later. Is there something else that I must do from an mysql or php standpoint to allow this to happen? Thanks Mark Roberts Sr. Systems Analyst