You haven't mentioned whether you have shell access on that server. If you did, you might be able to try out the mysql command on a command line, confirm that your connection parameters work that way at least, and generally poke around in your database account to make sure everything is kosher.

I assume that your connection string does not actually include the html tags for "italic font" -- I think everyone here who is looking at your code is assuming that you put the  <i> ... </i> around "dbname", "uname" and "pword" just for the sake of posting, to clarify that you are (wisely) not showing us the real values that you actually use in those slots to make the connection.

But just to be sure... if those "i" tags really are there in the script you're trying to run (and/or if that script isn't using the strings provided by the ISP for those slots), then that is surely the problem.