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How do you "really" find out if a Linux hosting plan is PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliant?

Posted by abefroman on · 3 comments
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Well you can ask them "are you PCI complaint?" However you shouldn't take their answer at face value. Recently, pretending to be a potential customer with an e-commerce website, I asked 10 random Linux hosts if their shared hosting plan was PCI compliant. 6 said no or no, its not possible on a shared hosting plan, which for the most part is true, especially if its less than $50/mo. As far as shared hosting goes you really should avoid looking at that all together if you are looking for the most secure, as well as a PCI compliant environment. However 3 hosts said yes, they are PCI compliant on their Linux shared plans, which is rather hard to believe.

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Comments (3)

gus3 ·
For a quick run-down of 3rd-party PCI compliance, this article doesn't do too bad, with one major exception:

Quoting:1. The web site and database housing the credit card information need to be on separate servers.... 2. The database server must be on a private IP range. This would be 10.x.x.x, 192.x.x.x, or 127.16.x.x
That last should be 172.16.x.x, which is Class B local networking. 127-dot-anything is the local host, which would violate requirement 1.

Sadly, having no comments and no way to contact the author directly, the article loses some important feedback features that make the Web such a boon.
djohnston ·
gus,

Looks like they read LXer. The line now reads

"2. The database server must be on a private IP range. This would be 10.x.x.x, 192.x.x.x, or 172.16.x.x"

Good work!
gus3 ·
I did also send a message through the "Contact us" form. All I could hope was that whoever reads those messages could either fix it, or send it to a fixer.

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