Top 13 HIPAA Compliant Hosting Servers for Healthcare Apps

Does your business handle electronic Protected Health Information (ePHI)? If yes, then there are chances that your business will require HIPAA-compliant cloud hosting server.

If you are collecting, storing or transmitting PHI to a covered entity then you definitely should be HIPAA compliant.

We’ve identified a list of 13 best HIPAA compliant cloud storage providers so healthcare software companies don’t have to go searching the web for a list as well as reviews for HIPAA compliant solutions.

If you’re looking to develop a HIPAA compliant application, get in touch with us today for a free quote – Arkenea has 13+ years of exclusive experience in healthcare application development.

#1 Atlantic.Net HIPAA Hosting

Atlantic.Net is a HIPAA compliant hosting provider that offers a full range of HIPAA hosting and related HIPAA compliance products. You can choose for HIPAA compliant server hosting, but also for more specialized HIPAA compliant database hosting, application hosting or offsite backups.

They offer custom-built HIPAA compliant hosting solutions, HIPAA compliant cloud storage and compliance services.

You can also decide to place your own servers in their HIPAA compliant data center. All of the products are combined with active and aggressive monitoring for security purposes making sure that the electronic protected health information stays safe through HIPAA compliant hosting and stays in accordance to HIPAA guidelines.

Support

24/7/365 Phone, Chat and Email Support.

Cost of HIPAA Hosting With Atlantic.Net

Offers numerous plans segregated by whether they are storage optimized, memory optimized or compute optimized.

#2 Amazon Web Services (AWS) HIPAA Hosting

AWS HIPAA Hosting is one of the most popular and trusted HIPAA compliant cloud storage servers for building healthcare apps. AWS has utility-based cloud services to process, store, and transmit Protected Health Information (PHI).

They sign a HIPAA business associate agreement (BAA) with you and provide you the physical server isolation you need. The BAA contract clarifies how your HIPAA obligations will be shared with AWS for HIPAA compliant hosting.

There’s back-end storage that can be mounted and you can fiddle with the amount of disk space. If you like, you can add EBS (Elastic Block Store), which is disk space that lives in the racks near you.

Customers can use any AWS service in HIPAA-compliant cloud applications. However, only the HIPAA-eligible services, including HIPAA hosting defined in AWS’s BAA can be used to process, store, and transmit personally-identifiable patient data for HIPAA compliant hosting.

AWS’ BAA currently applies to 9 services.

Cost of Amazon AWS HIPAA Hosting

AWS pricing is based on the usage of individual services, so you only pay for what you use. Even then, prices for HIPAA compliant hosting might start at 0.016/hour. There are many online articles that mislead on the true cost of HIPAA compliant hosting with Amazon AWS, some stating it would cost more than $2,000/month once you sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA). This is not true at all.

Here’s what the truth is:

Before, Amazon Web Services (AWS) mandated that organizations use “Dedicated Instances” exclusively for developing HIPAA compliant services. This resulted in higher costs for implementing HIPAA compliant workloads. Startups and organizations with limited resources faced challenges in creating HIPAA compliant services on AWS.

However, in May 2017, AWS announced the elimination of this dedicated instance requirement. This means that organizations can now utilize the AWS HIPAA Security program with instances of any size. When building HIPAA compliant applications on AWS, organizations are no longer restricted to specific instance sizes and can take advantage of a wide range of HIPAA-eligible services, including various EC2 services.

Ratings and reviews – AWS

InfoWorld: Amazon, the mother of all clouds

PC Mag: Editor rating for Amazon EC2: Good

Trustradius rating: 4.1/5

Cloudreviews editor rating: 5/5

#3 Microsoft Azure HIPAA Cloud Hosting Server

It calls itself ‘The cloud for modern business’. Microsoft Azure, formerly Windows Azure, is Redmond’s cloud computing platform.

Azure is a great competitor in the cloud application hosting arena, providing HIPAA compliant hosting solutions, and it’s perfect if you’re hosting a .NET application. There are three main divisions of the Azure service: Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS, or virtual machines), web hosting (for mostly static sites) and platform-as-a-service.

Azure is certified according to the many control frameworks that make up HITRUST, including HIPAA/HITECH and ISO 27001, providing a compliant foundation for healthcare industry customers, but the end-user solution is owned and managed by the Azure subscriber (and is thus not in-scope for Azure compliance processes).

Microsoft currently offers the HIPAA hosting/ BAA to all US customers as part of their Online Services Terms (OST).

Cost of HIPAA Hosting With Microsoft Azure

Service runtime is billed on hourly basis and covers the compute supporting the RESTful API layer that sits on top of the backend storage ($0.40 per hour). Structured Storage is billed for each GB used for your SSD-backed data and index ($0.25/GB/month). Provisioned throughput per 100RU/s (request units per second) is at $0.008 per hour.

Ratings and reviews – Microsoft Azure

PC Mag’s Editors’ Choice for small business cloud services.

Cloudreviews editor rating: 4/5

#4 Armor (previously Firehost) HIPAA Hosting Server

Armor prides itself as the most comprehensive secure cloud inTrueVault handles all physical and technical safeguards required by HIPAA infrastructure and HIPAA regulations to support HIPAA-compliant hosting needs and ensure HIPAA compliance.

Armor is certified against the Common Security Framework (CSF) from the Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST) to address HIPAA compliance requirements and provide HIPAA compliant hosting solutions and managed aws provider.

It is industry’s first true Compliance as a Service solution (Caas) giving HIPAA compliant hosting services.

Caas is a complete solution that provides insight into everything required for compliance: secure infrastructure, gap analysis, remediation, audit, ongoing security & compliance monitoring, and incident response and forensics.

You can access Armor support via live chat, phone numbers, and ticketing service. They are also active in social media networks.

Cost of HIPAA Hosting With Armor

Prices not disclosed. Offer a 30 second discovery tool that aligns the data workload to the hosting solution that meets database management, security and compliance requirements.

Ratings and reviews

Cloudreviews Editor and user rating: 4/5

#5 Truevault HIPAA Hosting

Truevault is another good option for ensuring your application meets the HIPAA technical and physical safeguards for meeting HIPAA compliant hosting requirements.

Truevault is one of the web hosting companies providing HIPAA compliant cloud hosting API and secure data store. It has a secure API to store health data and handles all physical and technical safeguards required by HIPAA. TrueVault decouples consumer identity from consumer behavior to eliminate data security risks and compliance liabilities, giving companies only the data they need.

As a HIPAA compliant hosting partner, it will sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with you upon account activation. This will ensure customer protection under a comprehensive Privacy and Data breach insurance policy for healthcare providers.

It enables you to store and search protected health information (PHI) in any file format through RESTful APIs. It also provides user identity and access control for your application.

Cost of HIPAA Hosting With Truevault

For its HIPAA compliant web hosting services, it offers three pricing tiers for startup, business and enterprise which vary in the number of ops, managed services and identities offered.

Ratings and reviews

No reviews found

#6 RackSpace HIPAA Server

Rackspace provides three types of cloud servers: open, private, and hybrid cloud. The private cloud environment offers HIPAA ready hosting. They also hold a HITRUST CSF (common security framework) certification that confirms their adherence to the high levels of data privacy standards. They have decent hardware, 15+ operation systems, image backups, Raid 10, impressive scalability, and many other services.

To help customers meet their compliance requirements with regards to HIPAA, Rackspace offers a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) in their dedicated hosting services segments. The public cloud can be set up in two ways- a managed infrastructure level and a managed operations level with the former being the less expensive option.

Cost of HIPAA Hosting With RackSpace

Offers utility based pricing costs with the option to choose from general purpose, compute optimized, I/O optimized and memory optimized resulting in consumption based pricing and billing.

Ratings and reviews

PC MAG Editor rating: Excellent

Cloudreviews editor rating: 5/5

#7 VMRacks (HIPAA Vault) Cloud HIPAA Hosting

VM Racks, that launched HIPAA Vault, is a privately-held cloud service provider offering a full suite of HIPAA Compliant Solutions including hosting, email, sftp and more.

They have a trademarked solution called True HIPAA Compliance™ which they use to guarantee their cloud hosting packages are 100% HIPAA compliant and they sign BAA’s for all customers.

The HIPAA compliant hosting providers support both Windows and Linux operating systems. The company provides services that deal with electronic patient health information (e-PHI), electronic medical records (EMR) and HIPAA compliant email services for the covered entity.

All of their HIPAA Compliant plans include monitoring, hardening, scanning, patching, and server security. Support for desktop, Android, and Apple applications also allows for greater accessibility to important documents and information from virtually anywhere.

Support System

24/7 support with every web hosting plan.

Cost of HIPAA Hosting With VMRacks

Basic plan starts at $199/month which includes 2 GB memory, 50 GB storage, 320 GB bandwidth and true HIPAA Compliance.

#8 Liquid Web HIPAA Hosting Service

To verify your data is secured to HIPAA compliance standards the company provides cloud solutions and compliance services with technical controls, backup management, disaster recovery, offsite data centers, safeguards and physical security policies and HIPAA compliant environment to ensure compliance with HIPAA security rule.

Business Associate Agreements (BAA) is available upon request, which will require the acquisition of server configurations that meet minimum security requirements.

Support

24*7 support system in place; they call it HIPAA-trained Heroic Support® engineers.

Cost of HIPAA Hosting With Liquid Web

for the hosting providers, the single server web hosting starts at $299 and $359 for Linux and Windows respectively. The price for multiple server web hosting starts at $788 for Linux and $958 for Windows.

#9 Aptible HIPAA Hosting

Aptible enables healthcare providers and digital health organizations to implement an entire HIPAA compliance program through managed services and dedicated servers.

They run on deployment workflow, and their compliance validation engines streamline every component of the HIPAA Privacy and Security Rules, and Breach Notification Rules.

They provide comprehensive packages, including backups, audit trails, and even employee training.

Support

You can leave a mail or chat with them. They usually respond within an hour or so during business hours.

Cost of HIPAA Hosting With Aptible

Fully customised pricing plans based on your requirement as a part of aptible comply. Under aptible deploy, the development packs start at $0 while the production packs start at $999 per month.

Rating

4.4 on G2.com

#10 Datica (erstwhile Catalyze) Cloud HIPAA Hosting 

Catalyze, or now rebranded as Datica, is a HIPAA compliant hosting solution that provides cloud computing for healthcare apps. They offer two products: a backend-as-a-service (BaaS), or set of APIs to build compliant apps and a compliant platform-as-a-service (PaaS) for running custom applications and databases.

For both products, they provide logging, monitoring, backup, disaster recovery, encryption (in-transit and at rest), IDS, dedicated servers, file integrity logging, and vulnerability scanning. Datica is HITRUST Certified.

Support

You need to submit a ticket. Responses are sent within 24 hours. Existing customers typically receive a response in less than an hour during normal working hours.

Cost of HIPAA Hosting With Datica

Offers compliant kubernetes service for ensuring compliance of patient data in the cloud. It also offers Datica integrate which is the industry’s first any-to-any solution for health data integration and compliance.

The pricing quotation of both these solutions can obtained on call with the Datica team.

#11 Connectria HIPAA Hosting Server

Connectria offers enterprise level HIPAA compliant hosting solutions. They offer HIPAA-compliant hosting for customers in the healthcare and dental industry or anyone who must comply with the HIPAA and HITECH Act security standards surrounding the storage of Protected Health Information (PHI).

Connectria has partnered up with TripWire to offer HIPAA compliance monitoring. They setup and manage HIPAA Compliant environments in their data centers, and also in HIPAA Compliant environments in AWS.

They are Business Associates Agreement (BAA) friendly web hosting service, and routinely enter into Business Associates Agreements with our customers.

They have a pretty aggressive service level agreement (SLA) offering a 100% uptime guarantee as well as a 100% secure guarantee.

Support

Solutions Architects are available 7 days a week for assistance. You need to fill a form and they usually get back within 24 hours.

Cost of HIPAA Hosting With Connectria

Prices are based off your monthly cloud spend. Spend under $2k a month starts at $199 and up to $10k a month comes at $399 per month. If your spend exceeds $10k, the quotation can be obtained via consultation.

#12 LightEdge HIPAA Server

LightEdge, which acquired OnRamp’s fully-compliant HIPAA Foundation Solution, bundles the compliance-critical hardware and software features to help you meet HIPAA’s stringent compliance requirement.

Their offering comes with a whole range of HIPAA compliance service. OnRamp’s HIPAA compliant web hosting allows you to choose from 3 different HIPAA hosting solutions, with HIPAA foundation solution, HIPAA advanced solution, and HIPAA enterprise solution.

LightEdge has also developed a 3-Step HIPAA Risk Management Tool to easily diagnose, assess and manage any vulnerabilities and risks with implementing customers’ IT infrastructure at OnRamp.

Support

IT infrastructure and critical data backed support available for 24/7/365.

Cost of HIPAA Hosting With LightEdge

Price on request.

#13 Healthcare Blocks HIPAA Hosting

Healthcare Blocks is a HIPAA-compliant application platform that powers healthcare technology systems of all sizes, from small startups to large medical groups.

They are partnered with and built on Amazon Web Services. They are Business Associates Agreement (BAA) friendly and don’t ask for any long-term contracts from the customers.

The platform is fully-managed by the Healthcare Blocks team and offers versatility, with most languages and databases supported.

Cost of HIPAA Hosting With Healthcare Blocks

The startup package starts at $170 per month while the growth package starts at $1065 per month. The enterprise packages are available on request.

Support

Available via email, chat, and help desk website. Response time is usually less than 1 hour during normal business hours.



Author: Dr Vinati Kamani
Dr Vinati Kamani writes about emerging technology and its application across industries for Arkenea. Dr Kamani is a medical professional and has worked as a dental practitioner in her earlier roles. She is an avid reader and self proclaimed bibliophile. When Vinati is not at her desk penning down articles or reading up on the recent trends, she can be found travelling to remote places and soaking up different cultural experiences.