I just realised my Digital Ocean VPS is using an American time-zone, EEST or something that is quite impractical for me. Will there be side effects if I change the server time-zone to UTC or local?
Not sure, I guess @mpalmer is the best person to ask.
There are a bunch of things that will be affected if you change the timezone. Whether any of them are show-stoppers for you is something only you can decide.
- The timezone of all timestamps in logs, etc will change, and if you’re doing any work that crosses the boundary you’ll need to account for that.
- Not everything will pick up the timezone change immediately, so you’ll be best to reboot the machine when you change, to make sure nothing’s running around with an out-of-date timezone definition.
- Discourse’s database should be fine (we store everything in UTC) however sidekiq and anything else that uses timing might get a bit confused for a little while (see above re: rebooting). Same goes for anywhere that times might get passed around without timezones attached (naughty naughty, but it does happen). Once again, REBOOT.
Probably a bunch of other things will change as well, so after you do it, you can come back here and report. 
Ok, that sounds scary. Luckily the UX front seems doesn’t seem to have complications, even though the server TZ is somewhere on the East Coast. (This is not a sane default btw, using Digital Ocean’s Frankfurt premises).
Two additional questions:
- How is daylight saving handled? That is due soon and happens at a different date in the US vs my home country.
- Ubuntu 16.04 is near, and I’ll likely upgrade next summer. What is the source and target servers are on different zones when I backup and restore?