Well that was interesting. I had my first attempt at deploying a Sharepoint site I created to a remote server. At first I wasn't sure how smoothly the deployment would go. The main reason is that my test environment hosted the Sharepoint site and the database on the same server. The remote site would host the Sharepoint site on one server with the database residing on another server behind a firewall.
The smigrate.exe utility that is found in the bin folder of the Sharepoint services web services extensions folder made life somewhat easier. This utlity is used to back up your Sharepoint site to a single file that you can then transfer to the remote site. At the remote site, you can simply reuse smigrate to restore the site. Pretty slick. However, there is one gotcha.
When you install Sharepoint Services on the remote server, ensure there is a top level web site created first or the restore will fail with the message, “The web server at <url here> does not appear to have Sharepoint Services installed.”, or something along those lines, I don't remember the exact string. It leads you to the wrong conclusion, that Sharepoint is indeed not installed or at least not installed correctly. The solution is to create at least one top level web site on the Sharepoint server. Your restore will go smoothly after that.
My site also contains custom user controls hosted in web parts. These web parts and functionality will not transfer with the smigrate tool. You will need to either manually copy the user controls and web parts yourself or create and installer package and install your controls and web parts using that installer.
Gerry