HIPAA Ready Secure Healthcare Hosting

It means our hosting infrastructure provides the technical, physical, and operational safeguards that support HIPAA compliance. That includes encryption, dedicated IP addressing, VPS-level isolation, firewall protection, on-site physical security, and full hardware chain-of-custody. We provide the infrastructure layer. Full HIPAA compliance also requires a Business Associate Agreement (BAA), organizational policies, and staff training on the part of the covered entity, which are outside the scope of this hosting plan.

No. Ultra does not currently offer a BAA. We are transparent about this because we believe it's important for healthcare organizations to understand exactly what they're getting. Our plan provides the server-level infrastructure and physical safeguards that support compliance, but a BAA is a separate legal agreement. Many covered entities work with compliance consultants or healthcare attorneys to establish BAAs with their vendors.

"HIPAA compliance" is not a property of hosting infrastructure alone, it is a property of how a covered entity runs its operations as a whole. Ultra's HIPAA Ready plan ships pre-configured with TLS, a dedicated IP, VPS isolation, server-level firewall, intrusion detection, audit logging, and chain-of-custody hardware. On top of that, you still need your own written policies, workforce training, risk analyses, breach response plan, and a BAA with each vendor that touches ePHI. We supply the infrastructure piece; the rest is yours.

Data in transit is encrypted with TLS via a free Let's Encrypt SSL certificate (auto-renewing) that's included on every HIPAA Ready account. HTTP, IMAP, SMTP, and the cPanel control panel itself are all TLS-only. Modern cipher suites are enforced and the certificate supports HTTP/2. Encryption at rest on the underlying storage is not enabled by default at the plan tier and should be configured at the application level (database-column encryption, file-level encryption) by the covered entity if required by the organization's risk analysis.

Automated backups are not included with the HIPAA Ready plan by default. The dedicated VM gives you full root and cPanel access to configure your own backup workflow: rsync to a remote host, snapshot-based replication, your preferred compliance-friendly backup service, or JetBackup as an optional managed add-on. Our team can help configure customer-supplied backup solutions that meet your compliance counsel's documented requirements.

The infrastructure on the HIPAA Ready plan supports the technical safeguards required for hosting ePHI: TLS, VPS isolation, dedicated IP, firewall, intrusion detection, audit logging, and physical security. Whether ePHI can be stored is a question for your compliance counsel, because it also depends on your BAAs, written policies, risk analysis, and workforce training. We do not provide legal or compliance advice; we provide the infrastructure layer that compliance reviewers ask about.

Ultra's HIPAA Ready secure healthcare hosting plan starts at $49.95 per month when billed annually. This includes a dedicated IP address, 25GB of SSD storage, unlimited email accounts, free SSL certificate, VPS-level isolation (dedicated virtual machine), on-site hardware with drive chain-of-custody, cPanel control panel, and 24/7 on-site support. The regular month-to-month price is $79.95.

Standard shared hosting plans run as cPanel accounts on multi-tenant servers (with CloudLinux CageFS separating accounts at the filesystem level), share IP addresses with other accounts, and on cloud-hosted providers the operator has no physical control over the hardware. This plan is a dedicated virtual machine: your own VM with its own dedicated CPU, RAM, storage allocation, kernel, and IP address. The hypervisor enforces hardware-level separation between VMs, and we physically own and operate the underlying server. Our staff are the only people with access to the hardware, and there is no third-party data center operator involved.

A dedicated IP means your site is not sharing network identity, mail-server reputation, or SSL termination with other accounts. For HIPAA workloads it also makes audit trails and firewall rules clearer because every connection log entry is unambiguously yours, not "someone on this shared IP."

Only Ultra's on-site staff. We own the data center building and the hardware, our staff sit in the same building as the racks, and no third-party data center technician, cloud-provider employee, or outside contractor has access to the machines that store your data. This is the question we hear most from healthcare compliance reviewers, and we are one of very few hosts that can answer it cleanly.

Drives that fail or are retired are removed from production, secured, and destroyed in-house: typically degaussed and physically shredded on site. We do not hand drives to outside vendors. Chain-of-custody is documented end-to-end so you have a clear answer for any compliance review that asks "how do you decommission storage media?"

Server access (SSH, cPanel logins, FTP) and administrative actions are logged. Login activity, file changes, and configuration changes are recorded. Account-level logs are visible in cPanel; server-level logs are available on request for compliance reviews and security audits.

Yes. This plan fully supports WordPress and includes the Softaculous one-click installer. We also support WooCommerce, patient portal plugins, intake-form plugins, and appointment scheduling systems. All WordPress installations run within the dedicated VM with TLS encryption and audit logging in place.

For solo therapists and small therapy practices we have a dedicated page with therapist-specific FAQs covering intake forms, telehealth platforms, and integration with SimplePractice, TherapyNotes, Jane App, and Counsol. See HIPAA Hosting for Therapists & Counselors.

Yes. Ultra offers free website migration with annual or longer plans. Our migration team handles cPanel transfers, database moves, and email setup with extra care taken on credentials and data handling during the transfer. Just submit a support ticket after signing up with your current host's login details inside the ticket system (not email).

Ultra guarantees 99.9% uptime backed by RAID-protected storage, UPS-backed power, redundant Cisco networking, and on-site staff. The HIPAA Ready VM runs on the same Dell PowerEdge hardware that powers the rest of our owned-infrastructure fleet.

Yes. The HIPAA Ready Hosting plan includes a 45-day money-back guarantee. Request a refund through the client area within 45 days of signup for a full refund on the hosting service. Domain registration fees are non-refundable since they're paid to the registry on your behalf.

Yes. When a single VM is no longer enough, our VPS plans (root access, guaranteed CPU/RAM) and dedicated server plans (full hardware control) are the upgrade path. Our support team handles the migration with no downtime, and the same on-site physical safeguards apply at every tier.