MySQL Connecting Remotely
Information on the internet about remotely to the MySQL database is quite confusing. All over the place you may find information about bind-address configuraiton in the my.ini file. Even I wrote about it recentlyHowever, after setting bind-address option it will no longer be possible to connect to MySQL database from localhost.
The guys from freenode IRC server #mysql channel clarified the situation:
remove bind-address= and skip-networking from my.cnf and grant permission to the external 'user'@'host' and remove any firewall rules blocking port 3306 and make sure no overrides on the mysqld commandline. See http://hashmysql.org/index.php?title=Remote_Clients_Cannot_Connect
bind-address is exclusive, not inclusive, it limits mysql server to what interface to listen on for incoming connections