Unable to connect Website to my phpmyadmin MySQL database - php

Question

Before I get into the question, I ran into a lot of questions, both on this website, as well as a bunch of others, however none of the solutions there helped, and so decided to post a question with my exact situation.
So I am currently building a website, and am trying to connect it to a MySQL database I have created on phpmyadmin through hostgator. I am currently using 000webhost.com to host my webpages, as the computer I am working on does not have an ftp client, and am unable to install it as of now. As such, I decided to upload the files onto there temporarily as I build it, as they are dynamic webpages. Whenever I load up the page, however, I receive this error:
Warning: mysqli_connect(): (HY000/1045): ProxySQL Error: Access denied for user...
where the "..." just lists my username and filepath to the file.
this is my php code to connect to the database:
<?php
define("DB_SERVER","localhost");
define("DB_USERNAME","**user**");
define("DB_PASSWORD","**password**");
define("DB_DATABASE","**database_name**");
if(!mysqli_connect(DB_SERVER,DB_USERNAME,DB_PASSWORD)){
echo"Failure";
}
else{
echo"Success!";
}
?>
I double- and triple-checked the database username, password and name, however to no avail. Thanks a lot in advanced!

Answer 1

You have to change your DB Server location due to you are not using the same web server as your hosting.
Change this
define("DB_SERVER","localhost"); to define("DB_SERVER","YOUR_REMOTE_DB_SERVER");
Also you have to enable remote access in your mysql database.
You can check this similar topic

Answer 2

To answer your initial question, there is no call to connect.
define("DB_SERVER","localhost");
define("DB_USERNAME","**user**");
define("DB_PASSWORD","**password**");
define("DB_DATABASE","**database_name**");
$conn = mysqli_connect(DB_SERVER, DB_USERNAME, DB_PASSWORD);
then test your connection.
As for setting up a localhost for development, if you are using Windows I would suggest XAMPP, it is pretty much download and say yes to all.