Why Drupal needs a HIPAA host, not a generic one
Drupal is the CMS of choice for large health organizations because of its content model, multilingual support and role-based permissions. None of that matters if the host will not sign a BAA.
Patient-facing content is regulated content
Symptom checkers, appointment requests, patient education with personalisation and portal logins all put Drupal in the path of protected health information. Under 45 CFR § 164.308(b) the host must sign a BAA before that data arrives.
Shared hosting fails at the contract stage
Most mainstream hosts will not sign a BAA for shared plans at any price. Without that signature, placing patient data on their servers violates the rule no matter how secure the stack is.
Memory-optimised tiers for a database-heavy CMS
Drupal runs on our memory-optimised tiers, with 16 GB of RAM at Solo, with CloudFront and a WAF in front of every size, so Views, caching layers and search stay fast under load.
Every Drupal tier runs on hardened, single-tenant infrastructure with encryption, logging and monitoring configured before handover.
Where our responsibility ends
Stated plainly, because knowing this before an incident is worth more than discovering it during one.
We run
- The AWS account, VPC and network isolation
- The operating system, patching and hardening
- PHP, the web server, the database and TLS
- CloudFront, the WAF, encryption, audit logging and backups
- Monitoring and infrastructure incident response
You run
- Your Drupal codebase, modules and themes
- Drupal core and contributed-module updates, unless scoped with us
- Content, users, roles and permissions
- The systems your site integrates with and the data you send them
If a problem turns out to be the server, the runtime or the infrastructure, open a ticket and we take it. If it is inside Drupal, we tell you what we found and hand it back with recommendations.
HIPAA hosting vs standard hosting
A $10 shared plan is not slightly less compliant; it is categorically different. Most mainstream hosts will not sign a BAA for shared hosting at any price.
Standard Hosting
Basic web hosting
HIPAA Compliant Hosting
Healthcare-grade security