On the Ldeveloper Tech Blog today there's a helpful new post about an error PHP's SOAP extension could throw about not being able to connect to the host despite all settings being correct.

I receive this nasty error yesterday and it took me some time to figure out the problem: "Fatal error: Uncaught SoapFault exception: [HTTP] Could not connect to host in...". This ["new SoapClient"] line passes without any problems and this [var_dump on __getFunctions] shows the function prototypes correctly.

His script connects to the service as its supposed to but the "could not connect" is still thrown. He found a few references to OpenSSL issues that could cause it, but his code was correct so he turned to the other side - the service itself. As it turns out, it wasn't configured correctly.

It was configured to send invalid url and the function calls were using that invalid url. So there are two solutions [...] the first is to configure the server correctly. The other is to give __doReguest the correct location.