Call to a member function bind_param() on a non-ob

I know there is a ton of other questions like this, but none that I found answered my problem.

I get the following error Call to a member function bind_param() on a non-object with the following code:

$servername = "localhost";
$username = "MyUsername";
$password = "MyPassword";
$dbname = "MyDatabase";

$conn = new mysqli($servername, $username, $password, $dbname);
var_dump($conn);
$stmt = $conn->prepare("SELECT COUNT(email) FROM subscribers WHERE email LIKE ?");
var_dump($stmt);
$stmt->bind_param("s", $email);
$stmt->execute();

var_dump($conn) returns:

object(mysqli)#2 (19) { ["affected_rows"]=> NULL ["client_info"]=> NULL ["client_version"]=> int(50011) ["connect_errno"]=> int(2002) ["connect_error"]=> string(25) "No such file or directory" ["errno"]=> NULL ["error"]=> NULL ["error_list"]=> NULL ["field_count"]=> NULL ["host_info"]=> NULL ["info"]=> NULL ["insert_id"]=> NULL ["server_info"]=> NULL ["server_version"]=> NULL ["stat"]=> NULL ["sqlstate"]=> NULL ["protocol_version"]=> NULL ["thread_id"]=> NULL ["warning_count"]=> NULL }

and var_dump($stmt) returns:

NULL

My query is correct, I tried it out in phpMyAdmin, it works.

The odd thing is that this exact code worked on my localhost, after uploading it it stopped working.

EDIT

After replacing $stmt->execute(); with

if(!$stmt->execute()){trigger_error("there was an error....".$conn->error, E_USER_WARNING);}

And adding error_reporting(E_ALL); ini_set('display_errors', 1); I get the following errors:

Warning: mysqli::mysqli(): (HY000/2002): No such file or directory in [...]

Warning: mysqli::prepare(): Couldn't fetch mysqli in [...]

Warning: main(): Couldn't fetch mysqli in [...]

EDIT 2

Here are my mysqli settings are these the way they are meant to be?

So I contacted the hosting company and the solution was quite simple really. While connecting to the database I used "localhost" as a servername which does not work when you are on a shared hosting service. All I needed to do is to change it to the servername specified in my MySQL configuration.