HIPAA Vault Alternative 2026

What HipaaVault actually offers

HipaaVault (Etica Inc., founded 1997) is a focused HIPAA-compliant managed cloud host. They are real, audited, and have built a reputation in their corner of the market over nearly three decades. Before we draw any contrast, give them their due:

• SOC 1 / SOC 2 / SOC 3 audited (a real, verifiable third-party attestation we do not hold ourselves).
• HUBZone 8(a) SBA certification.
• Compliancy Group Verified HIPAA Seal of Compliance.
• Inc 5000 honoree, Google Cloud Partner badge, founder Gil Vidals still hands-on with the company.

Their "True HIPAA Compliance" managed-cloud bundle is a strong piece of work. According to hipaavault.com/true-hipaa-compliance/, customers receive:

• Signed Business Associate Agreement (BAA).
• PHI encryption at rest (AES-256) and in transit (RSA 2048).
• 24/7 system monitoring with SIEM and centralized logging.
• Six-year log retention to satisfy 45 CFR audit-trail expectations.
• Eighteen managed-services modules covering business continuity and disaster recovery, two-factor authentication, managed firewall rules, IDS / IPS, host-based intrusion detection, web application firewall, anti-DDoS, antivirus, custom IP reputation, vulnerability scanning, multi-tenant isolation, server hardening, SSL certificate management, on-site and off-site backup, and bootless kernel updates.

For a healthcare organization that already has its compliance program documented and only needs a HIPAA-aligned home for the application layer, that bundle is genuinely good value. The published entry tier is roughly $84 per month for a static HIPAA WordPress environment and $499 per month for a managed Linux base that runs dynamic workloads.

One important transparency point that customers often miss until they read it on HipaaVault's own site: penetration testing is not delivered in-house. Quoted verbatim from hipaavault.com/hipaa-pen-testing/:

"At HIPAA Vault we provide comprehensive penetration testing services through a partnering agency for healthcare organizations." Source: hipaavault.com/hipaa-pen-testing/

That is not a criticism. Plenty of hosting providers route pen tests to specialized firms. It is a fact you should know when you compare scope and accountability across vendors, especially if your auditor or your cyber insurance carrier wants the test report tied back to a single accountable party.

What HipaaVault does not include

This is where the conversation usually shifts. HIPAA-compliant hosting and HIPAA-compliant organization are not the same thing. The Security Rule at 45 CFR 164 places the obligation on the covered entity or business associate, not on the data center. Reading HipaaVault's own product pages carefully, the following items are absent from the standard bundle:

• Formal HIPAA Security Risk Assessment per 45 CFR 164.308(a)(1)(ii)(A), scoped to your specific organization, workforce, and PHI flows. Hosting compliance does not produce this document for you.
• Policy and procedure authoring tailored to your workforce roles. Templates exist on the open market, but a defensible policy set has to reflect how your team actually handles PHI.
• HIPAA workforce training delivery with attestation tracking. If a regulator asks for the training log this afternoon, hosting does not produce it.
• BAA inventory management for your other vendors. Your hosting provider signs one BAA with you. You still need to inventory and track every other vendor that touches PHI.
• In-house penetration testing. As HipaaVault states on their own page, pen tests are delivered "through a partnering agency."
• Incident response retainer and forensic-grade investigation for the suspected breach phone call at 11pm on a Saturday. Hosting will produce logs. Someone still has to read them, scope the incident, and decide whether to file a 60-day breach notification.
• Board-level or executive compliance reporting for healthcare boards, parent companies, and cyber insurance carriers that increasingly want quarterly cyber posture briefings.

Customers can buy each of these separately, sometimes from Compliancy Group itself, sometimes from a HIPAA consultancy, sometimes from a forensics firm. The result is a stack of three to five vendors with overlapping responsibilities, separate billing, separate phone numbers, and a real risk of finger-pointing during the first incident. That is the gap this page exists to address. (For a deeper treatment, see why hosting compliance is not org compliance.)

The point is not that HipaaVault is hiding anything. Their pages are accurate. The point is that the marketing word "compliant" is doing two different jobs in healthcare conversations: it can describe the configuration of a server (which HipaaVault delivers well) and it can describe the posture of an organization (which is your obligation under 45 CFR 164). The OCR audit protocol asks the second question. Buyers who confuse the two often discover the gap during their first incident drill, their first cyber insurance renewal questionnaire, or the first time a hospital partner sends them a 60-question vendor risk assessment.

Where Petronella fits

Petronella Technology Group operates a deliberately small HIPAA hosting plus compliance program practice out of Raleigh, North Carolina. The buyer who benefits is not the practice that wants commodity hosting. It is the healthcare organization, healthcare-adjacent SaaS, or regulated specialty group that needs the program layer and wants one accountable team rather than four vendors.

Real credentials we hold (verifiable, no fabrication):

• CMMC Registered Provider Organization (RPO) #1449, listed in the official CyberAB member directory.
• CMMC Registered Practitioner (RP) team: Craig Petronella, Blake Rea, Justin Summers, Jonathan Wood.
• Digital Forensics Examiner #604180 on staff (Craig Petronella), supporting in-house penetration testing and breach investigation.
• BBB A+ rating since 2003, twenty-four years of continuous operation in 2026.
• Real reviews only: 15 verified Google reviews at 5.0 stars on the petronellatech.com profile, plus 92 reviews aggregated through Trustindex on petronella.ai. We do not publish fabricated AggregateRating schemas or invented testimonials.
• Office: 5540 Centerview Dr., Suite 200, Raleigh, NC 27606.

The bundle our practice ships at the Practice tier (From $2,500/mo) covers the hosting layer (Plesk-managed environment on the Petronella server fleet, signed BAA, AES-256 at rest and TLS in transit, six-year log retention, multi-tenant isolation, 24/7 monitoring) plus the program layer (annual HIPAA Security Risk Assessment, policy and procedure authoring, HIPAA training delivery with attestation tracking, in-house annual penetration test, written incident response plan, quarterly tabletop, AI fleet for tier-one triage with documented human escalation). Multi-location and Enterprise tiers extend to roughly $4,000 and $6,000 per month respectively.

If you want the full architecture and bundle detail in one place, the parent pillar is our HIPAA hosting plus compliance program page, which sits inside the broader HIPAA compliance hub.

Side-by-side comparison

Verified facts only. HipaaVault numbers come from their public pricing pages. Petronella numbers come from our published Practice, Multi-location, and Enterprise tiers.

¹ "At HIPAA Vault we provide comprehensive penetration testing services through a partnering agency for healthcare organizations." Source: hipaavault.com/hipaa-pen-testing/, retrieved April 2026.

When HipaaVault is the right choice

Honest answer: there are real scenarios where HipaaVault is the better fit, and we will say so on a sales call. Choose HipaaVault if any of these describe you:

• You already have a current Security Risk Assessment, written policies, training records, and a working incident response plan, and you only need a HIPAA-aligned cloud to run a website, form, or application.
• Your procurement or upstream contract requires a SOC 2 Type II attested hosting provider and you do not need the program layer wrapped on top.
• You want commodity hosting at the $84 to $499 per month price point and you have internal staff (or a separate consultant) who runs the compliance program.
• You have many low-complexity environments (dozens of static HIPAA-aligned WordPress sites) where program-layer services per environment would not pay back.

If that is your situation, HipaaVault, Atlantic.net, Liquid Web, or AWS HIPAA-eligible services are sensible vendors. We do not try to sell against the right-fit choice for the buyer.

When Petronella is the right choice

Premium-fit signals for our practice look like this:

• You are a healthcare practice, multi-location specialty group, or healthcare-adjacent SaaS handling PHI, and you do not have an internal compliance officer who owns the SRA, policies, training, and incident response.
• Your last Security Risk Assessment is more than a year old, or you cannot confidently produce a workforce training attestation log on demand.
• Your cyber insurance carrier or your board is asking for documented evidence of the program (not just hosting compliance) and you want one accountable vendor rather than four.
• You are an engineering firm, defense contractor, or other regulated business with HIPAA-adjacent contracts and you also need CMMC or NIST 800-171 work; Petronella RPO #1449 is one of a small number of providers that ties HIPAA program work to CMMC posture under one team. (See healthcare cybersecurity and healthcare medical solutions for the vertical and deliverable angles respectively.)
• You want a small, named team, a capped tenant count, and a phone number that connects to the same humans who built and run your environment.

The SOC 2 question

This is the most common pushback we get and we want to handle it head-on, no spin. Petronella Technology Group does not currently hold a SOC 2 Type II attestation on our own infrastructure. The annual cost of operating that audit at our scale (roughly $100,000 per year) would erase the margin model that lets us cap tenants and keep operations boutique. That is a deliberate tradeoff, not an oversight.

For deals where the buyer's procurement, upstream prime contractor, or cyber insurance carrier specifically requires a SOC 2 Type II audited host, our Enterprise tier routes the hosting workload onto a SOC 2-holding upstream partner stack. Liquid Web is our recommended wrap partner; Atlantic.net and HipaaVault itself are also candidates depending on the workload shape. Petronella Technology Group continues to own the program layer (Security Risk Assessment, policy authoring, training delivery, incident response, BAA chain) and signs a single BAA with the customer.

The result for the customer: you get the SOC 2 attestation evidence your contract requires, plus the program layer most attested hosts do not deliver, without paying for our SOC 2 audit. One BAA. One accountable party. The wrap-partner relationship is documented in your engagement letter so there are no surprises during your own audit.

If your procurement does not require SOC 2 Type II at the host (this is the common case for clinics, dental groups, behavioral health, specialty practices, and most healthcare-adjacent SaaS) the Practice or Multi-location tier on our own fleet is the better economics.

One more nuance: SOC 2 Type II at the hosting layer does not, by itself, satisfy the HIPAA Security Rule. Auditors increasingly want both, and they want the program-side controls (Security Risk Assessment, training, IR readiness) tied to the customer's organization rather than to the host. That is exactly what the wrap pattern is designed to deliver. You get the host's audit evidence in your vendor file and our program work tied to your workforce, your PHI flows, and your roles.

Migration and switch process

If you are coming off HipaaVault (or Atlantic.net, Liquid Web, AWS, or self-hosted) the move is straightforward. Three steps, written in plain English:

1. Free migration audit (30 minutes). We review your current hosting BAA, the scope of your last Security Risk Assessment, your training attestation log, your incident response readiness, and the application stack we would be migrating. You receive a one-page written summary of gaps and the priority order to close them. No slide deck, no pitch.
2. Fixed-price scoping. If a migration makes sense for both sides, we issue a fixed-price scope covering the hosting move plus the program layer onboarding (SRA kickoff, policy review, training rollout, IR plan stand-up). Pricing tier ranges from "From $2,500/mo" at the Practice level to roughly $6,000 per month at the Enterprise tier. Custom quote after audit.
3. BAA and onboarding sprint. We sign the BAA, stand up your Plesk environment on our fleet (or on the wrap-partner stack if SOC 2 is required), migrate DNS and data with zero scheduled downtime where possible, kick off the Security Risk Assessment in week one, deliver policies and training within 60 days, and run the first tabletop within 90 days.

The audit step is genuinely free and genuinely separable. If we are not the right fit, you keep the one-page audit summary, you keep the comparison PDF, and you part friends. Several practices we have audited have stayed on their current host with our written gap list to give to their existing vendor; that is a fine outcome.

Ready to compare in detail?

The fastest way to make this decision is to look at your environment, not at marketing pages. Book the free 30-minute migration audit and walk away with a written one-page summary you can use either way.

For the full bundle architecture, pricing tiers, and the 10-question FAQ on hosting versus organizational compliance, see our HIPAA hosting plus compliance program pillar. For the broader HIPAA control library, the HIPAA compliance hub is the parent.

Doing your own due diligence first? Read the HIPAA Hosting Buyers Guide: 12 questions you can take to any vendor.