KnownHost Now Offers PCI Compliant Hosting: Here’s What That Means for Your Business
If you run an online store, accept payments through your website, or handle cardholder data of any kind, you’ve almost certainly wrestled with PCI compliant hosting requirements. The questionnaires, the scan failures, the back-and-forth with your payment processor. It’s a lot to manage on top of actually running a business. We built our new PCI Compliant Hosting plans to take the infrastructure side of that burden off your plate.
What PCI-DSS Actually Requires from Your Hosting
The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard sets technical and organizational requirements that any merchant handling card data must meet. A big chunk of those requirements come down to your server environment: how traffic is encrypted, what ports are exposed, whether your software stays patched, how accounts stay isolated from one another, and whether a WAF filters malicious requests before they reach your application.
Most standard shared hosting environments don’t meet these requirements out of the box. Merchants on regular shared plans end up chasing down scan failures that their host either can’t fix or won’t address quickly. Our PCI Compliant Hosting changes that equation by starting from a properly hardened baseline.
What We’ve Done Under the Hood
Every PCI Compliant Hosting account runs in its own isolated container via CloudLinux’s LVE (Lightweight Virtual Environment) system. This isolation isn’t just good for compliance. It gives you guaranteed CPU, memory, and I/O resources that no other account on the server can touch. No noisy neighbors, no shared risk.
Our team configures the servers to PCI DSS standards at the network and OS level from the ground up. We disable weak SSL/TLS protocols and cipher suites, leaving TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3 enforced across the board. We close unnecessary ports. ModSecurity WAF runs on every plan, filtering traffic before it reaches your account. Our team handles OS and software patching, so you don’t have to track it yourself.
Every account comes with a dedicated IPv4 address and free SSL certificates, correctly configured from day one. Our team runs automated daily backups and keeps them on retention. You get full SSH access and the complete cPanel control panel to manage your site, email, and databases through a familiar interface.
An Important Clarification About PCI Compliance
PCI Compliant Hosting covers the hosting portion of your compliance picture. Full PCI compliance also depends on your application code, how your software handles and stores cardholder data, and your internal business processes. Those areas stay the merchant’s responsibility.
The server environment passes the technical scans that Approved Scanning Vendors (ASVs) run. You still need to run quarterly external vulnerability scans through an ASV and complete your annual Self-Assessment Questionnaire. That paperwork doesn’t go away. But when you run those scans on a KnownHost PCI Hosting account, the server comes back clean. If a scan flags something on the server side, open a ticket with the scan report attached and our team will address it.
We track changes to the PCI-DSS standard as new versions roll out and update our hardening configurations to match.
Compliance Shouldn’t Cost a Fortune
We offer three tiers, all available across our Atlanta, Seattle, and Amsterdam data centers.
The Entry PCI Hosting plan starts at $24.95/month. It includes 2 CPU cores, 2 GB of memory, and 50 GB of NVMe storage, and handles up to 100,000 visits per month. It’s the right starting point for smaller storefronts that need a compliant environment without paying for capacity they don’t use.
The Business PCI Hosting plan runs $34.95/month and steps up to 4 cores, 4 GB of memory, and 100 GB of NVMe storage, with room for up to 200,000 monthly visits. We recommend this one for most growing e-commerce operations.
The Corporate PCI Hosting plan at $79.95/month delivers 6 cores, 6 GB of memory, 150 GB of NVMe storage, and handles up to 500,000 monthly visits for higher-traffic sites.
All three plans run on LiteSpeed web server with NVMe-backed storage. They include Imunify360 for real-time malware and intrusion protection, Redis and Memcache object caching, and our full 24/7/365 support team.
If your business has grown beyond shared hosting or needs more control over the environment, our managed VPS and dedicated server plans can also meet or exceed PCI DSS requirements. Reach out to our team and we’ll help you find the right fit for your size and traffic.
Already Hosting Somewhere Else?
If you’re switching to KnownHost for compliance reasons (or any other reason), our team handles the full migration for you, including files, databases, and email, at no additional charge. Your site stays live during the move, and we test everything after so you’re ready to run scans from day one.
To get started, visit https://www.knownhost.com/pci-compliant-hosting . If you have questions about whether our PCI Hosting environment fits your specific situation, reach out to our team and we’ll walk you through it.