PCI-Compliant Hosting

What Does PCI-Compliant Hosting Mean?

PCI-compliant hosting is a hosting service designed to help merchants conform to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) instituted by credit card companies. Hosting services that are designated as PCI compliant can be depended upon to meet the PCI standards under a PCI compliance audit or other assessment.

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Techopedia Explains PCI-Compliant Hosting

In general, merchants that process credit card transactions must comply with the PCI DSS set up by credit card companies. In some cases, merchants are audited for compliance, and auditors look at all aspects of their IT operations to make sure cardholder information is handled safely, including during transmission, processing and storage.

New hosting services such as cloud provider services that conform to the PCI DSS may designate themselves as being PCI compliant. Clients must ask vendors to prove PCI compliance to ensure that they can help them pass any audit. PCI-compliant hosting generally creates a safe and secure environment for cardholder information and a safe connection to the Internet from the consumer’s browser to the company’s Web server and into the cloud or anywhere else cardholder information goes.

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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…