I have just finished a trial account. Very happy with the initial trial, wanted to pay via PayPal which in itself was a problem (waiting for it to be setup).

When the trial was expiring I asked the customer support to enable Paypal payments and asked if I would be able to continue from where I left off. I was told nothing is removed for 7days after the trial.

After finally managing to pay via PayPal my trial account was restored to a state of 6am in the morning....although my trial didn't expire to later in the afternoon.

I even received an email hours later at 1.39PM UTC explaining that my Trial was about to expire and I could upgrade it.

When a trial account is deleted, a backup should be taken or it should be left untouched for atleast 24hrs so a customer can upgrade without losing a days work.

Agents shouldn't be giving false information either, if I was told "Your trial account will be deleted, we will only have a backup from the morning before your trial expired" then I would have taken my own backups.

Happy customer -> unhappy before the migration even took place!

Everything is pre-configured and installed as ASCII.

if I go in and change the default encoding, it is confusing. What if I want to upgrade to PHP& and MariaDB 10? In what order should the default encodings be changed? After upgrading to PHP 7?

The Server, MySQL and PHP all have separate encoding settings. It seems like changing these at the right time during initial configuration is vital.

So if you were installing Magento 2.1 on a GCloud server, how would you go about it?

After the server is created, should I go in and change the default encodings to UTF-8 for the Server, MySQL and PHP and then upgrade to PHP 7 and MariaDB 10 afterwards?
And then change the updated default encodings again afterwards to UTF-8?

Because after upgrading PHP and MySQL, the encoding defaults are blank when I go back to check them (instead of the initial ASCII they came with or the UTF-8 I changed them to before upgrading)...

Should I restart in between?

See how confusing this is?

I cannot create a server without an app. It seems like maybe creating the server first would be best.

For Example:

• Create the server


• Update the encodings for the current PHP and MySQL installation


• Upgrade PHP to PHP7 and MySQL to MariaDB 10


• Update the encodings for PHP7 and MariaDB 10

I think this would be ideal.

Then, install the app onto the server that has had it's default encodings updated to the customer's preference,

There are too many paths available to update these encodings. Before, after, in the middle of everything, etc.

This opens up the possibilities for problems and misconfigurations. And without root (I am not complaining, I am just trying to prove a point), this could turn out bad.

My Setup:
Cloudways - UTF-8 - Magento 2.1 - Google Cloud Platform - N1-STD-2
PHP7, MariDB 10, Varnish and Redis