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At the infrastructure: yes, all servers should be UTC, (almost) no question.

As for guessing timezones - I use GeoIP to get the user's approximate location, then figure out the timezone based on that. It is not perfect, but I needed something that does not require JS.

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If you don't need the user's timezone immediately for their first request (which I assume is why you can't use a javascript solution), using getTimezoneOffset() works pretty well.

Shameless plug: I wrote a gem to handle this in Rails ( https://github.com/zmillman/browser-timezone )

right, geoIP is another interesting solution... the best is to combine several guessing techniques, when available

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