You can override your server’s timezone setting using php’s date_default_timezone_set. It is a really good idea, in my opinion, to use this at the start of your scripts that work with timestamps. Reason being, you can transfer scripts between servers and they will always work, which wouldn’t necessarily be the case if they depend on a servers timezone e.g if you are calculating a unixtime value in your script.

For example, I had an Ajax Calendar app that used Unixtime values to calculate which data to retrieve from a MySQL db. This worked fine on my dev server, whose server timezone was GMT, but when I transferred the code to my production server, which runs on E.T, it was not retrieving the correct data! This was a major pain to debug, as the code itself was fine of course, and was solved with a single line of code:

date_default_timezone_set(”GMT”);

Place this at the start of any script that has a dependency on the server timezone, and you can port your code to any server regardless of its timezone. If you don’t know your server’s timezone, date_default_timezone_get() will give it to you.