Best HIPAA-Compliant Hosting

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Best HIPAA-Compliant Hosting Overview

HIPAA-compliant hosting is a specialized infrastructure service designed to safeguard electronic Protected Health Information (ePHI) in accordance with the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. HIPAA-compliant hosting is required for any Covered Entity (e.g., hospitals, clinics) or Business Associate (e.g., managed service providers, app developers) that creates, receives, maintains, or transmits ePHI.

Choosing a HIPAA-compliant hosting provider requires significant thought and consideration. Most HIPAA-aligned deployments use bare metal or dedicated infrastructure to simplify compliance, but it is possible for cloud servers to be compliant; however, this approach takes greater planning and consideration.

Choosing between private (single-tenant) bare metal and public cloud dedicated options depends largely on your internal technical resources and risk tolerance: private options provide maximum isolation and control; public cloud offers rapid scalability but requires rigorous configuration and monitoring to remain compliant.

Why it matters: Using non-compliant hosting is a violation of federal law and can trigger significant penalties (currently exceeding $2.1M per violation category per calendar year, subject to annual inflation adjustments), plus legal liability, breach response costs, and reputational damage. Operational compliance ensures your environment is audit-ready and sustains patient trust.

Illustration representing HIPAA-compliant hosting for protecting ePHI

Key Takeaways

Shared responsibility model icon for HIPAA compliance

Compliance is a shared responsibility: Providers handle physical facilities and core infrastructure; you remain responsible for application security, identity and access management, and configuration of services within your environment.

Business Associate Agreement (BAA) icon for HIPAA hosting

The BAA is non-negotiable: If a provider will not sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) for your specific use case, they are not suitable for hosting ePHI. Note: cloud providers are BAs even if they cannot view encrypted ePHI.

Single-tenant private hosting icon showing maximum control

Private hosting = maximum control: Single-tenant private cloud or dedicated servers eliminate “noisy-neighbor” contention and offer the highest isolation.

Public cloud HIPAA controls icon indicating compliant configuration

Public cloud is viable with care: Major public clouds can support ePHI in production under a BAA, but typically require meticulous configuration (networking, IAM, keys, logging) and continuous monitoring.

Audit logging icon highlighting retention and audit readiness

Logging matters for audits: HIPAA requires retaining required documentation for at least six years. Align audit-log retention to this requirement where logs evidence required actions/activities, and justify retention via risk analysis.

Encryption icon for protecting ePHI in transit and at rest

Encrypt everything (risk-based): Encrypt ePHI in transit (TLS 1.2/1.3) and at rest using NIST-recommended algorithms in FIPS-validated modules when feasible; if not feasible, document compensating controls per HIPAA’s addressable specifications.

Administrative, physical, and technical safeguards icon for HIPAA compliance

Safeguards are holistic: Effective compliance integrates Administrative, Physical, and Technical safeguards across people, process, and technology.

Benefits & Features of HIPAA-Compliant Hosting

Adopting a compliant hosting environment is about more than avoiding fines; it establishes a structure for operational excellence and data integrity. Patients expect their private data to be managed per HIPAA guidelines.

Benefits of HIPAA Hosting

There are several advantages to HIPAA-compliant hosting. These advantages highlight the positive business impact of running healthcare applications and services on compliant infrastructure.

Risk reduction: Offloads facility and core infrastructure security to external experts, reducing exposure to common failure modes and misconfiguration.
Audit readiness: Ensures availability of relevant certifications and attestations (e.g., SOC 2 Type II with a public SOC 3), BAAs, and policy documentation that OCR investigators commonly request, and maps evidence to your environment’s scope.
Standardized security: Encourages best practices like least-privilege access and change control.
Patient trust: Demonstrates a clear commitment to protecting sensitive health information and builds partner confidence.

Benefits of HIPAA-compliant hosting for healthcare organizations

Key technical and administrative features of HIPAA-compliant hosting

Essential Features

To be HIPAA-compliant, it’s essential to implement the mandatory technical controls to meet requirements and reduce risk. Hosting providers achieve this by creating an environment designed to meet and exceed the physical, administrative, and technical safeguards of HIPAA compliance.

Encryption: ePHI encrypted at rest (e.g., AES with FIPS-validated modules) and in transit (TLS 1.2/1.3). Explicitly disable SSL and TLS 1.0/1.1.
IAM & MFA: Centralized identity and access management with multi-factor authentication for administrative and remote access. (Best practice today; note that future rule updates may make MFA explicitly required.)
Centralized, immutable logging: Comprehensive logs for authentication, access, system changes, and security events; time-synced and tamper-resistant.
Disaster recovery (DR): Encrypted, off-site backups with routine restore testing and defined recovery objectives (RPO/RTO).
Network segmentation: Firewalls, private networks/VLANs, and VPNs or private connectivity for administrative access and east-west isolation.
BAA availability: Executed before any ePHI is moved to the environment; clearly defines roles, responsibilities, and liability.

Which Service Type Fits Your Risk Profile?

Not all “HIPAA-compliant” hosting is created equal. Your choice depends on the division of responsibilities, desired isolation, and internal capabilities. You can take a do-it-yourself approach and take full responsibility, or outsource to a provider and share responsibility.

Use the following matrix to compare these options at a glance and choose the right ownership model for your healthcare business.

Service Type	Ideal For	Isolation	Controls Coverage	BAA	Operational Effort (You)	Flexibility	Cost Predictability
Managed HIPAA Hosting (e.g., managed private cloud)	SMBs, clinics, lean IT teams	High (curated)	High (vendor manages facilities, hypervisor, managed OS/security stack; you manage app/IAM/data)	Yes	Low–Medium	Medium	High
Private Hosting (DIY) (dedicated servers/private cloud you operate)	Enterprises, large hospital systems	High	Custom (you build and operate controls)	Possible	High	High	Variable
Public Cloud with HIPAA Controls	Startups/scale-ups, production PHI with strong DevSecOps	Medium (logical isolation)	High if configured correctly (you own configs: network, IAM, keys, logging)	Yes (via vendor)	Medium–High	High	Variable
Summary	Managed HIPAA Hosting: high curated isolation, high coverage, BAA yes, lower operational effort; Private Hosting (DIY): high isolation with custom controls and higher effort; Public Cloud with HIPAA Controls: medium logical isolation, high coverage if configured correctly, BAA via vendor, variable cost predictability.

Shared responsibility: In a managed environment, the provider typically secures the infrastructure (facilities, hardware, hypervisor, managed OS patching, IDS) and curated security services. In a public cloud, the provider secures the infrastructure of the cloud; you secure what you build in the cloud (OS hardening, network rules, key management, IAM, application security, data classification).

Costs, Risk & Audit Readiness

The cost of HIPAA hosting is often a fraction of the cost of a breach. It's important to evaluate total cost of ownership (TCO), including tooling, staffing, and continuous monitoring.

Focus on these operational essentials to stay audit-ready year-round.

Security risk analysis & risk management

Required under the Security Rule. Perform an initial analysis and update regularly (at least annually and upon material changes).

Documentation

Retain required documentation for at least six years (policies, procedures, and documentation of actions/assessments). Align system log retention accordingly based on how logs evidence required activities.

Logging

Confirm that your plan includes centralized log management and retention sufficient for investigations and audits, with time synchronization and tamper-evident controls.

Incident response

Ensure 24×7×365 monitoring and escalation with tested playbooks, RTO/RPO alignment, and third-party contact trees. Ensure that the most serious incidents can be identified outside of business hours.

Breach notification

Notify affected individuals without unreasonable delay and no later than 60 days. Notify HHS within 60 days only if ≥500 individuals are affected; for fewer than 500, report no later than 60 days after year-end (state-law obligations may be stricter).

Crypto & protocols

Prefer TLS 1.2/1.3 and NIST-recommended algorithms in FIPS-validated modules where required. A VPN is commonly used for administrative access or private connectivity but is not a universal requirement if TLS is correctly applied — also enforce key-management hygiene (rotation, separation of duties).

Introducing Atlantic.Net HIPAA-Compliant Hosting

With three decades of experience in high-availability hosting, Atlantic.Net excels at providing an infrastructure foundation specifically engineered for regulated healthcare workloads. Rather than relying on self-attestation, our HIPAA-compliant hosting platform undergoes rigorous third-party auditing.

We maintain SOC 2 Type II and SOC 3 certification, with specific assessments against HIPAA/HITECH standards by independent CPA firms. Since there is no official federal “HIPAA Certification,” these independent audit reports act as critical evidence required for your own compliance documentation.

Why Atlantic.Net?

Our platform is built on a rigorous audit framework rather than self-attestation. We maintain SOC 2 Type II and SOC 3 attestations, with specific assessments against HIPAA/HITECH standards conducted by independent auditors. Since the HHS/OCR does not offer an official “HIPAA Certification,” these third-party audit reports provide the concrete evidence necessary to satisfy your own compliance documentation requirements.

HIPAA audited: SOC 2 Type II–attested with a public SOC 3 report, and assessed against HIPAA/HITECH by independent third-party auditors.
Flexible BAAs: We work with you to execute a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) that aligns with your specific workflows and data flows.
Fully managed safeguards: Managed firewalls, intrusion detection systems (IDS), multi-factor authentication (MFA) enablement, and encrypted VPN options are available on HIPAA-compliant platforms.
Uptime SLA: A 100% infrastructure uptime SLA (excluding scheduled maintenance and documented exceptions) helps ensure critical healthcare applications remain available at all times — scope applies to infrastructure components; see SLA for details.

How to Get Started with Atlantic.Net

Want to know more about the Atlantic.Net award-winning HIPAA-compliant hosting service? HIPAA hosting is one of our most popular platforms, and we are proud to host a large number of healthcare organizations. At Atlantic.Net, we know that compliance is a difficult journey—especially when you are starting out—but we are standing by, ready to help and share our years of experience providing American healthcare businesses the best-in-class HIPAA hosting service available today.

Reach out today to start a conversation. We can then engage with you to discover:

Data flows icon showing where ePHI resides and how it moves

How your data flows →

Identify where ePHI resides in your environment and how it moves around (email, local servers, SaaS, cloud, devices, integrations).

Security risk analysis icon for documenting risks and controls

What is your security risk analysis →

Learn how to document risks, likelihood/impact, and selected controls—and how to update after significant changes.

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Speak to our architects →

Contact Atlantic.Net for a consultation to map your current environment to a HIPAA-aligned private, managed, or hybrid design.

Execute BAA icon representing signing the Business Associate Agreement

Execute the BAA →

Complete the Business Associate Agreement before ePHI is ingested into our HIPAA-compliant hosting.

Migration and encryption icon for securely moving ePHI

Migrate & encrypt →

Plan and execute a migration strategy with encrypted transfer, encryption at rest, hardened images, and validated backups/DR.

Monitoring and logging validation icon before go-live

Validate monitoring & logging before go-live →

Plan how to enable SIEM alerts, confirm retention settings, and ensure authorized stakeholders have dashboard access.

Post-migration validation

Discover what the service looks like after you migrate to Atlantic.Net HIPAA hosting—learn how to verify incident response, troubleshoot backup/restores, and implement access controls across the new environment.

Ready to secure your ePHI?

Engage our team today to map your environment, finalize your BAA, and ensure your go-live is fully compliant.
Contact us today to get started!

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