Your remote database server may have blacklisted your IP. Call your host, and see if they can whitelist your IP on your database server. When you use a remote server as your test server, you tend to connect very frequently with the remote server (far more frequently than you would in a live/production environment. This triggers a block). I had the same problem. My host whitelisted my IP, and it fixed it.
Now I use a local testing server for some of my projects to avoid this issue.