You should be able to setup a hot node using by adding the throne options to the crown.conf file. Shouldn't need the throne.conf at all for a hot node. Make sure to use an external IP address that has port forwarding enabled to port 9340. I need to get some sleep before i start debugging anymore. I've been working on the pool to try and get it ready for Crown payments

throne=1
throneaddr=
throneprivkey=
I've all that in my .crown/crown.conf. The server is a VPS, so its IP is public and there's no firewall or anything else that would block the port. In fact, I have 80 connections, including many incoming ones; I also verified that I can telnet to the address/port combination (51.254.131.226:9340). This used to work with the old client, and I haven't since touched the configs or the network configuration at all.