Beach

Just start simple: Choose a project plan which fits your needs, decide on a type for your first instance and that's probably all you need to get going. If you don't need time critical support, just start the "Solo" organization plan. If you later on need more instances for demo, staging and so on, you can still launch more instances. But for starters, just choosing a project plan with an instance is all you need.

Yes. Even though your Beach instances are in fact always moving Docker containers which are located somewhere in our clusters, you can login via SSH through our central SSH gateway. Here's a guide about that.

Yes, your choice. Every instance deploys from a specific branch you specify. And each instance has a webhook you can use from e.g. GitHub to notify Beach of changes to the repository. Beach then builds your project and either deploys it automatically once finished (if you switched auto-deploy on for that instance) or when you click the "Deploy now" button for that instance.

You can easily do that if you enter the ACE-String (ASCII form) of the domain name in the user interface. DENIC has a simple converter for this task: https://www.denic.de/service/tools/idn-web-converter/

Flow and Neos are running in a context like "Production/Beach/Instance". Therefore, if you retrieve the setting in Fusion using Configuration.setting('Neos.Flow.core.context') you will get exactly that string. If you'd like to know if it is a Production or Development context, you need to compare with a sub string instead: 

String.substr(Configuration.setting('Neos.Flow.core.context'), 0, 10) == 'Production'

Yes, that works as expected. See our MagicWand guide for details.