Error while creating a website – Illegal mix of collations (latin1_swedish_ci vs utf8mb3_general_ci)

[MainX]

I’m experiencing an error while trying to create a new website via CyberPanel. The process fails and shows the following error message:
[“(1267, "Illegal mix of collations (latin1_swedish_ci,IMPLICIT) and (utf8mb3_general_ci,COERCIBLE) for operation ‘=’") [404]”]

[usmannasir]

what is your domain?

[MainX]

tomeofmadness-demos.gr

[usmannasir]

The issue is a database collation mismatch. This typically happens when the database was created with different character set settings than what
CyberPanel expects. Here’s how to fix it:

Option 1: Quick Fix via phpMyAdmin

1. Access phpMyAdmin through CyberPanel

2. Select the cyberpanel database

3. Run this SQL command:
   ALTER DATABASE cyberpanel CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

4. Then update the affected tables:
   ALTER TABLE websiteFunctions_websites CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;
   ALTER TABLE websiteFunctions_childdomains CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

Option 2: Via Command Line

mysql -u root -p cyberpanel -e “ALTER DATABASE cyberpanel CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;”
mysql -u root -p cyberpanel -e “ALTER TABLE websiteFunctions_websites CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;”
mysql -u root -p cyberpanel -e “ALTER TABLE websiteFunctions_childdomains CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;”

Why This Happened:

• The error occurs because the database or tables were created with latin1_swedish_ci collation (MySQL’s old default)
• When CyberPanel tries to compare the domain name (which contains UTF-8 characters like in Greek domains), it fails due to collation mismatch
• The domain tomeofmadness-demos.gr likely triggered this because it’s being compared against existing data with different collation

Prevention:

To prevent this in the future, ensure MariaDB/MySQL default character set is UTF-8:

1. Edit /etc/mysql/mariadb.conf.d/50-server.cnf
2. Add under [mysqld]:
   character-set-server = utf8mb4
   collation-server = utf8mb4_unicode_ci
3. Restart MariaDB: systemctl restart mariadb

This is a one-time database configuration issue, not a bug in CyberPanel itself.