I'm trying to save a stripe (the billing service) company id [around 200 characters or so] to my database in Django. 

The specific error is:

```
database error: value too long for type character varying(4)

```

**How can I enable Django to allow for longer values?** 

I saw:
[value too long for type character varying(N)](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7747922/value-too-long-for-type-character-varyingn)
and:
[Django fixture fails, stating "DatabaseError: value too long for type character varying(50)"](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3803552/django-fixture-fails-stating-databaseerror-value-too-long-for-type-character)

* my database is already encoded for UTF-8, according to my webhost.
* **EDIT** : I see that one answer recommends making the column wider. **Does that involve modifying the PostgreSQL database?**

My specific system is Webfaction, CentOs shared machine, Django running on PostgreSQL. I would really appreciate a conceptual overview of what's going on and how I can fix it.