“Server Time” only uses UTC & Who’s online is questionable

Time Zone issue:
Our website uses a shared server on a hosting service.
I have set the “Local time” in our website php.ini file to America/Chicago. So, when I run phpinfo it shows Local time zone as America/Chicago (US Central time) but the “Main server” still shows UTC.
I have contacted the hosting service and they advised the Main time zone cannot be changed since this is a shared server.

Because of using the UTC time instead of Local time, my daily stats reset 5 or 6 hours (depending on DST) before the end of the day.

Is there a way to use the “local server time” or do an “offset” from UTC for the local time?

The last post with similar concerns I saw was posted and replied to 4.5 months ago. In the reply, it said the time zone option would be added to the next update.

The server “time” actually only outputs the UTC date. No time is displayed.

Who’s online:
Is there a “time out” on this? If I leave one computer logged into our website and use another device to check the stats later, sometimes it shows one or more and sometimes it shows zero logged on.

The who’s online is not a huge deal but the Time Zone is. Any idea when the next update will come out?