Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos — three regions, live now
Cloud infrastructure inside Kenya, Tanzania and Nigeria
One account, three countries, one invoice in dollars.
Your customers are in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam or Lagos. Your infrastructure is in Frankfurt, Virginia or Cape Town. Lineserve closes that gap with three regions — ke-1a, tz-1a and ng-1a — each inside the country it serves, on one account, one API and one bill in US dollars. Cloud servers start at $13.89 a month, a Linux VPS at $21.95, a Windows VPS at $31.95 with the licence included, and a dedicated LineServe Core 1 at $309. Deploy into one country or all three, keep the provider you already have wherever it already works, and pay by card or bank transfer.
- Three regions — Nairobi (ke-1a), Dar es Salaam (tz-1a) and Lagos (ng-1a)
- Quoted, invoiced and settled in USD, by card or bank transfer
- Or switch market and pay locally in KES, TZS or NGN
- Your data is held in the country you deploy it in
- 99.9% uptime SLA and free DDoS protection on every service
No credit card required · Local billing in KES, TZS & NGN
99.9%
Uptime SLA on every service
3
Live data centre regions
~5 ms
Typical round trip within Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos
3
Countries, one account and one bill
Running production workloads for teams in Kenya, Tanzania and Nigeria. Customer references available under NDA.
The platform
Everything you need to run close to your users
One platform, one bill, one support team — across compute, storage and space. Start small and grow into the whole stack without changing provider.
Cloud Servers
Build your own VM — pay per vCPU, GB and SSD. Linux or Windows, live in 60 seconds.
From $13.89/mo.
Explore Cloud ServersDedicated Servers
Single-tenant bare metal, built to your spec, with no shared resources.
From $309/mo.
Explore Dedicated ServersObject Storage
S3-compatible storage without the surprise egress bill.
From $0.035/GB.
Explore Object StorageColocation
Your hardware in our Tier III, carrier-neutral facilities.
From $100/U.
Explore ColocationLinux VPS
Root access and any distro, ready in seconds.
From $21.95/mo.
Explore Linux VPSWindows VPS
Licensed, activated Windows Server in seconds.
From $31.95/mo.
Explore Windows VPSManaged Kubernetes
Coming soonProduction Kubernetes with a fully managed control plane.
Learn moreManaged Databases
Coming soonManaged PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, and Redis.
Learn moreBlock Storage
Coming soonAttachable volumes that grow with your data.
Learn moreFile Storage
Coming soonShared network file systems for your instances.
Learn moreLoad Balancers
Coming soonDistribute traffic across your instances.
Learn moreMessaging
Coming soonBulk SMS, WhatsApp, voice and USSD for your apps.
Learn moreRegions
Three live regions. Data that stays home.
Deploy close to your users, in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam or Lagos. Whichever region you choose, your data is held in that country.
Kenya
Nairobi
~2 ms
typical, within metro · Data stays in Kenya
Tanzania
Dar es Salaam
~6 ms
typical, within metro · Data stays in Tanzania
Nigeria
Lagos
~4 ms
typical, within metro · Data stays in Nigeria
Why Lineserve
The advantages that only come from being here
A global cloud sells a far-away region, a foreign-currency bill and a support queue in another timezone. Everything below is what changes when the infrastructure, the billing and the people are in the country you are selling into.
Billed in USD
Pay by card or bank transfer — with local methods like M-Pesa available in our local markets. Priced and invoiced in USD, with no forex conversion on your side.
Infrastructure in your metro
Your server runs in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos, not an ocean away. Requests from your users reach it without leaving the country.
Support that knows your market
Reach a real engineer who works your hours and knows the market you sell into — not a ticket in a queue several timezones away.
Your data stays in-country
Deploy to the country you need and your data is held there, not moved somewhere more convenient for us.
No lock-in
S3-compatible storage, standard APIs, and open tooling. Bring your stack; leave whenever you want.
One platform, one bill
Compute, storage, and colocation from a single provider, invoice, and support team.
In production
Trusted with real workloads
Teams across Kenya, Tanzania and Nigeria run production systems here, from education platforms to fintech.
Customer references available under NDA — ask sales and we will arrange an introduction.
For developers
An API for everything, a console for the rest
Automate your infrastructure as code, or drive it from a clean console — your choice. Standard tools, standard APIs, no proprietary detours.
Full API & CLI
Create, resize, snapshot, and destroy resources programmatically.
S3-compatible storage
Keep the SDKs and tools you already use. Just change the endpoint.
Standard everything
SSH, RDP, cloud-init, and open images — no lock-in, no relearning.
# Store a backup in the region nearest your users — with tools you already have.
aws s3 --endpoint-url https://ke-1a.s3.lineserve.net \
cp ./backup.tar.gz s3://my-bucket/backups/Network
Three countries where the map has a hole in it
No hyperscaler runs a cloud region in Kenya, Tanzania or Nigeria. Amazon's African region is Cape Town; Microsoft's is in South Africa. Nairobi and Lagos have edge from them — local zones, content delivery, interconnect — with the compute in another country, and Tanzania has none of that either. Edge caches; it does not run your database. Serving these cities from a global cloud means serving them from another continent, and holding their personal data there.
Kenya's international capacity comes ashore at Mombasa — TEAMS, SEACOM, EASSy, LION2, DARE1 and PEACE — and is carried roughly 480 km inland to Nairobi. Domestic traffic is exchanged inside the city at KIXP, the neutral exchange TESPOK has run since 2002: 136 peer networks, 151 connections and 2.9 Tbps of capacity, with Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix and Meta among the networks present. ke-1a peers there.
Dar es Salaam has no inland haul at all: SEACOM, EASSy and SEAS land in the city itself, and it is a named landing point on 2Africa. Tanzanian networks exchange traffic at TIX, listed by PeeringDB at 32 networks and 798G, and 13,820 km of state fibre carries the rest of the country.
Lagos is the densest landing point in West Africa: eight subsea systems come ashore in Nigeria, among them MainOne, Equiano, 2Africa, WACS and SAT-3. IXPN, founded in 2006 to stop Nigerian networks swapping packets via London, now runs 13 points of presence across 7 states with more than 130 connected networks, and peak domestic traffic across it passed 2 Tbps by March 2026.
Which reduces to one sentence: a request from a user in any of these cities reaches a machine in the same city, on a round trip typically in single-digit milliseconds, instead of crossing an ocean and coming back — for every image, script and database query your page makes.
3
Live regions — Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and Lagos
0
Hyperscale cloud regions in Kenya, Tanzania or Nigeria
2.9 Tbps
Capacity connected at KIXP, Nairobi (PeeringDB)
130+
Networks connected at IXPN, Lagos, across 13 points of presence
Cape Town is not nearby
A request from Nairobi or Lagos to a South African region is an international one, and intercontinental paths out of these networks are commonly carried north to Europe before coming back down. Published research puts most of those round trips at roughly 100 to 400 ms. Proximity on a map is a poor guide to proximity on a network.
What the buildings are
The regions sit inside carrier-neutral, Tier III data centres run by specialist facility operators, and Lineserve runs its own hardware and network within them. Procurement asks who has physical access to the machine and which country the building stands in. Both have an answer.
Payments
Pay in dollars — or pay the way each country pays
Buying from outside Kenya, Tanzania and Nigeria, you are quoted and settle in US dollars, by card or bank transfer. That is deliberately unremarkable: a cloud server at $13.89 a month is $13.89 on the invoice, from a dollar price list rather than a conversion applied the moment you click. The option underneath is the interesting part — each of the three countries has its own market on this site, its own price list in its own currency, and its own payment rails.
Card
Visa and Mastercard, charged in USD. Cards suit monthly instances, smaller renewals, and the finance teams that would rather keep a card on file than issue a transfer instruction every thirty days.
Bank transfer
The rail for anything sizeable, and the one procurement is already set up for. A LineServe Core 1 at $309 a month plus a one-time $99 setup, or a year taken up front at ten months for twelve, is a transfer with a reference your reconciliation picks up.
Or let the local entity pay locally
If your Kenyan or Tanzanian subsidiary is the entity that should be paying, switch to that market and it settles in shillings, with M-Pesa alongside bank transfer and card. Nigeria settles in Naira by bank transfer or card. Each price list is set per currency rather than converted, so the figure a local finance team approves in March is the figure that clears in November.
Why that option is worth having
Tanzania is the sharpest case: since GN 198 of 2025 took effect in March 2025, goods and services within Tanzania are quoted and paid in shillings, which is how a Tanzanian finance function expects to be billed. Nigeria's reason differs — a Naira card carries a bank-set ceiling on international spending, and a dollar invoice consumes some of it every month it renews. Kenya's is simpler still: mobile money penetration there passed 100% of the population, so the wallet is the default and the card the alternative.
Annual billing is ten months for twelve on eligible plans. Displayed prices exclude tax; where VAT applies it is calculated and shown separately at checkout.
Data residency
Three data-protection laws, and the question each of them asks
Kenya's Data Protection Act, No. 24 of 2019, is enforced by the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner. Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act, 2022 has been in force since 1 May 2023, with the Personal Data Protection Commission operational since April 2024. Nigeria's Data Protection Act 2023 sits with the Nigeria Data Protection Commission. Three statutes, three regulators, and all three attach conditions to moving personal data out of the country.
They are not equally strict, and the differences decide architecture. Kenya's sections 48 and 49 allow a transfer on proof of appropriate safeguards, and Regulation 26 goes further for six named purposes — among them civil registration and identity, elections, public finance systems and basic education — requiring at least one serving copy inside Kenya. Nigeria's section 41 permits transfer where the recipient is covered by an adequate law, binding corporate rules, contractual clauses or a certification mechanism, and a Central Bank circular of 15 June 2026 adds a sectoral deadline: payment transaction data generated in Nigeria is directed to be stored and managed there from 1 January 2027.
Tanzania is the strictest of the three: personal data leaves the country on a permit from the Commission, applied for with the recipient, the categories of data, the purpose and the destination security arrangements set out. That is prior authorisation, and it finishes when a regulator says so rather than when you do.
Deploy into ke-1a, tz-1a or ng-1a and the data you put there is held in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam or Lagos, under that country's law, and it does not leave without your instruction. That is data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act, Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act and Nigeria's Data Protection Act — the part a hosting provider supplies. The assessment and the sign-off stay with your compliance function.
There is a mirror to this that buyers often find late. Kenya's Act reaches a controller not established or ordinarily resident in Kenya who processes the personal data of people located in Kenya. A company in Berlin or Boston with Kenyan users sits inside that Act whether its servers stand in Frankfurt or Nairobi. Hosting abroad moves the machine, not the obligation.
Traffic in the other direction
Personal data moving into these regions from Europe or the United Kingdom is a transfer under your own law, and your data protection officer runs that analysis. Most buyers land on the same shape anyway: the in-country tier holds that country's users' data, and the rest of the estate stays put.
A second region is a decision
Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and Lagos sit on one account and one API, which makes standby and replication a configuration rather than a project. Make the call deliberately: a copy of Tanzanian personal data in Lagos is a transfer out of Tanzania under the permit regime above. Application images and telemetry without personal data raise no such question.
Tax & invoicing
Three VAT rates, three tax authorities, one supplier
Kenya charges 16% VAT on digital and hosting services, administered by the Kenya Revenue Authority, whose list of taxable digital services names email hosting and cloud backup. Tanzania's mainland rate is 18%, administered by the Tanzania Revenue Authority, with Zanzibar administering digital-services VAT separately. Nigeria charges 7.5%, administered by the Nigeria Revenue Service — the body most Nigerian buyers still call FIRS. On identical infrastructure the Tanzanian tax line is more than twice the Nigerian one.
Which rate touches your invoice follows where you buy from and which market bills you, not which region your instance runs in: you can run a database in Lagos and be invoiced in dollars against a head office in Amsterdam. Where a local subsidiary is the buyer, it is billed in that country's currency and that country's treatment follows. The mechanics differ too — Tanzania requires an Electronic Fiscal Device verification code on a mainland receipt before a VAT-registered buyer can claim input tax, and Nigeria's framework changed wholesale on 1 January 2026, putting large taxpayers inside a mandatory e-invoicing regime.
Withholding is the other question a CFO raises on the first call. A Tanzanian business paying a non-resident for services withholds 15% of the gross consideration unless a double tax agreement reduces it, and Nigeria's 2025 legislation carries its own schedule. Your adviser places your purchase against those; sales supplies the paperwork that conversation needs.
One account, or one per country
Most international buyers want one account and one dollar invoice covering all three regions, and that is the default. Others need each subsidiary to hold its own account in its own currency so the cost lands in the right ledger. Both work — but the second is a conversation to have before you order, not after.
What a claimable invoice carries
Much the same checklist in all three countries: the supplier's registered name and identifiers, your own tax identifier, a unique invoice number, the service and the period, the taxable value, and the tax stated separately. Send [email protected] the tax identifiers for the entities that will appear on the invoices — a KRA PIN, a TRA TIN, a Nigerian TIN — and the account is set up once rather than corrected later.
Prices exclude VAT. Nigeria's tax framework changed on 1 January 2026, so anything written about it before that date is worth re-reading.
Who deploys here
What international teams run in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and Lagos
SaaS expanding into a market
You run in Frankfurt or Virginia, and you have signed enough customers in Nairobi or Lagos that they have started mentioning the loading time. The usual answer is a regional tier rather than a migration: application servers and a read replica in-country, the control plane left where it is, DNS sending each user to the nearer origin. A cloud server is $13.89 a month.
Fintech entering a market
Payment API endpoints and webhook receivers taking callbacks that originate inside the country, ledger and reconciliation databases, KYC document stores, fraud scoring, and transaction logs that grow and never shrink. Nigeria is the sharpest case: payment transaction data generated in the country is directed to be stored and managed there from 1 January 2027. Bare metal from $309 a month for the ledger.
Development and donor programmes
DHIS2 and other health and monitoring platforms, KoboToolbox and ODK form servers taking submissions from field teams on mobile data, file sync for staff working days away from a city. Donor audits ask where the data sits; country offices ask why the survey server is slow. One deployment answers both.
Media and streaming with local audiences
Origin storage plus egress is the shape that punishes distance hardest, and Tanzania has no content-network edge at all, so a Dar es Salaam viewer is served from another country however the CDN is configured. S3-compatible object storage, with transfer and API requests free, is $0.061 per GB a month and $0.035 at scale.
Agencies and integrators with clients in-region
Your client's tender says the data is held in-country and your architecture says Frankfurt. Multi-tenant client hosting, staging environments, Git-based deploys, and an in-country IP address so client sites resolve locally. One account covers all three countries: one supplier relationship, one API, one renewal date instead of three.
Consolidating what you already have
A rack a partner manages in Lagos, a server under a desk in a Nairobi office, and a Tanzanian shared-hosting account nobody can find the login for. Three regions on one account, one console and one invoice replace three suppliers and three renewal dates you keep missing.
Founders building for a market they know
Plenty of companies serving these countries are run from somewhere else, by people who grew up with the market. The product usually knows what it needs — mobile-first pages, an origin near the users, a payment integration that receives callbacks locally — and infrastructure has been the part that would not cooperate. Deploy in the city, bill in dollars from wherever you are.
Cloud servers from $13.89/month, Linux VPS from $21.95, Windows VPS from $31.95 with the licence included, dedicated LineServe Core hardware from $309 plus a one-time $99 setup, managed Kubernetes from $27.86, object storage from $0.061 per GB, and colocation quoted per footprint.
Getting here
Move the workload, or just add the country
From a global cloud's nearest region
Today your Kenyan, Tanzanian or Nigerian users are served from Cape Town, Frankfurt or northern Virginia, and every request pays for that distance twice. The move itself is an ordinary afternoon: build the instance, rsync, dump and restore the database, run both for a day, cut the DNS over. What changes afterwards is larger than the server. Your users stop crossing an ocean. Your data stops being a cross-border transfer somebody has to document and defend. And when a prospect's procurement form asks which country the data is held in, the answer is a city name.
Alongside the provider you already have
This is the more common shape and there is nothing second-best about it. Keep AWS in Frankfurt or Google Cloud in London for everything that already works, and put a Lineserve region underneath the part that has to be in Lagos: the user-facing tier, the read replica, the payment records, the object store your customer's regulator asks about. An IPsec or WireGuard tunnel between the two, replication across it, DNS routing each user to the right origin. Nothing has to be migrated, and you end up with a region in a country where your current provider does not have one. The second and third countries are the same configuration with a different region code.
Migration planning and assistance are included at no extra charge, whether you are coming from a hyperscaler region on another continent, a colocation cage you have outgrown, or a local provider in one of the three countries. Tell [email protected] what you run and where, and the reply is an architecture rather than a quote.
FAQ
Questions, answered
Yes, and it is the default. You are quoted, invoiced and settled in USD by card or bank transfer, whichever region you deploy into. Switching to the Kenya, Tanzania or Nigeria market changes the currency to KES, TZS or NGN.
No. The account is yours wherever you are and the region is a choice at deploy time. A local entity affects how you want to be billed and taxed, not whether you can run in ke-1a, tz-1a or ng-1a.
LINESERVE, INC., registered in Dover, Delaware. What is in Kenya, Tanzania and Nigeria is the infrastructure: three regions, data held in-country, and local currency billing in each of the three markets.
By where your users and your data are — Kenyan in ke-1a, Tanzanian in tz-1a, Nigerian in ng-1a. If you serve two of the three, run two regions: there is no useful midpoint, and per-unit prices are the same everywhere.
Yes. Data placed in a region is held in that region's city and is not moved out of the country without your instruction. That gives you data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act, Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act or Nigeria's Data Protection Act, depending on the region.
You do, and you remain the controller of it. Lineserve holds and serves what you put there; you decide where it lives and when it moves. Ask [email protected] about a data processing agreement.
The law of the country it is held in, which is the point of holding it there: Kenyan law in ke-1a, Tanzanian law in tz-1a, Nigerian law in ng-1a. Your own obligations as a controller travel with you.
No. Kenya's Act reaches a controller not established or ordinarily resident in Kenya who processes the personal data of people located in Kenya. Hosting in Frankfurt moves the servers, not the obligation — and in-country hosting removes the cross-border transfer analysis for the data that stays.
No. Amazon's African region is Cape Town and Microsoft's is in South Africa. Nairobi and Lagos carry edge infrastructure — local zones, content delivery, interconnect — with the compute in another country, and Tanzania has neither edge nor region.
Yes, and that is the default: one account, one USD invoice, however many regions you use. If you would rather each subsidiary held its own account in its own currency, that works too — set it up before you order.
Displayed prices exclude tax, and where VAT applies it is calculated and shown separately at checkout. The domestic rates differ — Kenya 16%, Tanzania 18% on the mainland, Nigeria 7.5% — and which reaches your invoice follows which market bills you, not which region you run in.
Tell [email protected] which one and what you would run there. Uganda, South Africa and Ghana are the regions in planning, and colocation in the three live cities is quoted per footprint if you need your own hardware in a specific building.
That path is intercontinental and always will be — your team reaches the console over the same internet as everyone else. The region is for your users in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and Lagos, whose in-metro round trips are typically single-digit milliseconds.
Customer references are available under NDA. Tell [email protected] what you are building and which country it is for, and you will be pointed at the closest match.
Nairobi and Dar es Salaam run on East Africa Time, UTC+3; Lagos on West Africa Time, UTC+1. Neither observes daylight saving, so the offsets hold all year. Reach the team at [email protected] or through the ticket system.
Uptime SLA
99.9%
- Service credits applied automatically when we miss the SLA
- Tier III colocation facilities across all live regions
- Local support, in your timezone
Support & reliability
Backed by an SLA and real people
A 99.9% uptime SLA on every service, Tier III facilities, and a support team in your region and timezone. When something needs a human, you get one.
Build on infrastructure that's actually near you
Fast, local, and reliable — from a single VPS to a full rack. Start in minutes, pay in local currency, and grow into the whole platform.
No credit card required · 99.9% uptime SLA · Local billing in KES, TZS & NGN