Connecting to SQL Server 2008 on windows server 2008 Hell all

I am new to windows server 2008 and we are trying to transfer our website from hosting to virtual server.

I installed SQL Server 2008 Express edition and I did the things like opening port and allowing them through the firewall but I can't log into to the remote server from my local machine.

I am not quite sure which IP address to use to connect to SQL Server from local machine whether is it servers IP address or will SQL give us a different IP address.

Please help.

Thanks
You will be using the servername (DNS) or the IP address of the server.  But if you have a named instance (as opposed to the default instance), your servername will be followed by \instanceName.

So, in other words unless you changed any SQL Server Express install defaults, you should connect to the server like this:

yourServerName\sqlexpress


SQL Server Express has a default named instance name of SQLEXPRESS.  Also, since SQL Server Express is a named instance, you'll need to ensure that your SQL Server Browser service is running.

Another one.  If you are trying to connect to SQL Server from a separate machine, you'll need to ensure that the TCP/IP protocol is enabled for SQL Server.

The above two points can be verified and configured in SQL Server Configuration Manager.