Re: connection collation

[Rick James]

There are multiple settings; you have control over at least some of them...

Let's see what is in my.cnf/my.ini:
SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'character_set%';
Perhaps the Hosting service does not let you change these at the my.cnf level.

Now, let's see what your tables are like:
SHOW CREATE TABLE tbl;
That will tell you what format characters will be stored in. Presumably you have control over that, even if it was originally created by some package.

The third factor comes from the code. Can you see the code? Do you have any control over it? In particular, I am looking for
SET NAMES utf8;
SET GLOBAL character_set... = ...;

The character_set% settings declare what character set (utf8, latin1, etc) is being used at each end of the client (your end) / server (hosting service). If the client end is inconsistent, you get a mess.

MySQL will convert (say, between latin1 and utf8) on the fly if so specified.

OK, assuming none of the above leads to a solution. You may have to change VARCHAR to VARBINARY and TEXT to BLOB in your CREATE TABLE definitions. BINARY and BLOB ignore character set issues.

Note: I did not mention "collation". Other than (mis-)using "collation" in your questions, I do not see that collation is a problem. At least, not until the character set is fixed.