You can change the default webserver character set by adding a custom rule in your .htaccess file. The rule should contain the actual rule - AddDefaultCharset , followed by the charset you wish to use.

For example, if you are having problems with pages which have text in Cyrillic, you can add this rule to your .htaccess file:

AddDefaultCharset windows-1251

Please note that this will change the default charset recursively for all folders. This means that if you put this rule in a .htaccess file in your main public_html folder, the default charset for all your files and subfolders will be set to the one defined in the rule.

This will not resolve charset issues if the text is in a database. More information on how to change the charset collation in a database can be found in this article.