Imagine that you’ve deleted an account via WHM. Now you need to recreate it again. Unfortunately, you got the following error message:

Account Creation Status: failed
A database owner with the name USERNAME already exists

Sometimes it happens because some configuration files were not removed from the account-deletion scripts. But here is the simple solution:

Navigate to /var/cpanel/databases:

cd /var/cpanel/databases

Find all files related to deleted USERNAME. You’ll see something like this:

USERNAME.cache
USERNAME.yaml
USERNAME.json

Delete these files.

Now, remove all entries related to USERNAME in these files:

/var/cpanel/databases/users.db
/etc/dbowners

To do it quicker, you can use a sed onliner:

sed -i '/USERNAME/d' /var/cpanel/databases/users.db
sed -i '/USERNAME/d' /etc/dbowners

After this you’ll be able to successfully recreate your terminated account via WHM.