Best PCI-Compliant Hosting

No. A hosting provider's PCI DSS compliance and Attestation of Compliance (AOC) cover the infrastructure and managed services they operate. Your applications, configuration decisions, internal procedures, and business processes still require their own documented controls. Strong hosting reduces and hardens your CDE — it cannot, by itself, make your business PCI compliant. You still need to complete the appropriate Self-Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ) or Report on Compliance (ROC).

PCI DSS v3.2.1 was retired on 31 March 2024 and is no longer the standard against which assessments are performed. v4.0 was published in March 2022 with a transition period; v4.0.1 (the current version) was published in June 2024 with minor clarifications and corrections to v4.0. v4.0.1 brings stronger authentication requirements (including phishing-resistant MFA for personnel with access to the CDE), more prescriptive password requirements, expanded scope around scripts on payment pages, and a customized-approach option that lets organizations meet objectives via alternative implementations.

The CDE is the set of people, processes, and technologies that store, process, or transmit cardholder data — plus any system component connected to or that could impact the security of the CDE. To reduce scope, isolate the CDE from the rest of your network with strong segmentation (firewalls, VLANs, dedicated subnets), tokenize or outsource card capture (e.g., redirect/iframe payment pages to a hosted page), and minimize the systems that touch raw card data. The fewer systems in scope, the fewer controls, evidence, and tests your QSA needs to review.

The right SAQ depends on how you accept and process card data:

• SAQ A — card-not-present merchants who fully outsource the cardholder data environment to PCI-DSS-validated third parties (typical for sites using a hosted payment page or full redirect).
• SAQ A-EP — e-commerce merchants where the website affects the security of the payment transaction but does not directly receive card data (e.g., direct-post or JavaScript that forwards to a PSP).
• SAQ B / B-IP — merchants using only imprint or standalone terminal devices.
• SAQ C — merchants with payment-application systems connected to the internet.
• SAQ D — all other merchants and all service providers eligible to complete an SAQ. Service providers above defined transaction volumes are typically required to complete an on-site assessment with a Report on Compliance (ROC) instead of an SAQ.

Your acquirer or QSA will confirm the appropriate SAQ for your specific environment.

An AOC is the official summary statement attached to a completed SAQ or ROC. It confirms that an entity has been assessed against PCI DSS and which requirements were validated. When choosing a PCI-focused hosting provider, ask for their AOC and read its scope carefully — the AOC tells you exactly which services and facilities the assessor evaluated, and which were excluded. Inheriting controls from a hosting provider's AOC is one of the fastest ways to shrink your own assessment effort.

PCI DSS requires audit log history to be retained for at least one year, with the most recent three months immediately available for analysis. File integrity monitoring, vulnerability scan results, incident records, and supporting evidence should follow the same minimum retention. Your business or contractual requirements may extend retention beyond this baseline.

Yes. PCI DSS v4.0.1 requires multi-factor authentication for all access into the cardholder data environment and for all remote network access — both for administrators and for any user (including third parties) connecting from outside the company's trusted network. Where the standard previously allowed two-factor authentication, v4.0.1 requires it explicitly and applies it more broadly. MFA methods must be resistant to replay and bypass, and any remaining static-password factors must meet stronger length and complexity requirements.

Yes — Atlantic.Net hosts both PCI-aligned and HIPAA-aligned workloads on the same underlying audited infrastructure, and many of the underlying controls (segmentation, encryption, MFA, logging, hardening) overlap. The frameworks are different, however, so the documentation, attestations, and contractual instruments differ: PCI DSS uses SAQ/ROC and AOC; HIPAA uses BAAs and risk analyses informed by SOC 2 Type II / SOC 3 + HIPAA/HITECH attestations. Workloads should be logically segmented even if hosted in the same datacenter to keep PCI scope and ePHI flows clean.