The "general way" is to use UTC, which is very close to what is called: Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). There is no practical difference between the two.

Use UTC for date/time storage and convert that when necessary for user presentation. UTC marches onward and never goes "backward".

In local time, a day may have just 23 hours or may have 25 hours. There can be even wild things like Samona which recently just "deleted one day" (Friday, Dec 30, 2011) when they decided to be on a different side of the "date-line" - a political decision. Samoa Date Change

When converting from UTC to local time there can be some ambiguities. Think about this 2 AM deal in the US when we either "spring forward" or "fall back". In some locales like mine, there is a special law that doesn't allow the bars to be open one hour later on that special day when the clocks get set back one hour at 2 am (closing time is normally 2am). But the UTC time marches onward, regardless of the local time.