Colocation — Nairobi (ke-1a), Dar es Salaam (tz-1a) & Lagos (ng-1a)
Colocation in Kenya, Tanzania and Nigeria — your hardware, our hands
Colocation in carrier-neutral, Tier III data centres — close to home.
You own the equipment, your regulator or your customer wants it in a specific country, and you have nobody in that country to put it there. That is the whole problem this page solves. Send us the equipment list and the shipping date; our engineers receive the pallet, rack it against your elevation, cable it, label it and power it up, and tell you when it answers on the network. You keep the asset, keep root, keep the configuration you already run — and keep it inside Kenya, Tanzania or Nigeria. Footprints run from a single U to a full rack and on to private cages, quoted per footprint, in US dollars.
- Racked in ke-1a Nairobi, tz-1a Dar es Salaam or ng-1a Lagos
- We receive the shipment, rack, cable, label and power it up
- Remote hands for reboots, recabling, swaps and inspections
- Redundant power with a metered allowance per footprint
- Quoted per footprint in USD — tell us the rack layout and the draw
Local billing in KES, TZS & NGN · Data stays in-country
Kenya
ke-1a · Nairobi
Tanzania
tz-1a · Dar es Salaam
Nigeria
ng-1a · Lagos
Space & power
From a single U to a private cage
Rent exactly the space you need, with the power and connectivity to match. Priced monthly, billed in your currency, on standard commitment terms. Power allowances and cross-connects scale with your footprint.
Single U
A box or two.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos
- 1U of rack space
- 1A / 120 W
- 1 Gbps port
- Remote hands available
- IP transit allowance
Quarter rack
Small deployments.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos
- 10U of rack space
- 500 W power
- Cross-connect included
- Remote hands available
- IP transit allowance
Half rack
Growing footprints.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos
- 21U of rack space
- 1 kW, A+B redundant
- Cross-connect included
- Remote hands included
- IP transit allowance
Full rack
A full environment.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos
- 42U of rack space
- 3 kW, A+B redundant
- Dedicated uplink
- Remote hands included
- IP transit included
Private cage
Cages, suites, scale.
- Custom space
- Custom power
- Custom connectivity
- Dedicated remote hands
- Custom transit
Prices exclude VAT and setup. Power above your footprint's allowance is $500 per kW per month. Colocation is offered on standard commitment terms; cross-connects and additional transit are quoted per requirement. Local currency figures are indicative and confirmed on your quote.
Network & location
Why the rack goes in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam or Lagos
No hyperscaler runs a cloud region in any of the three countries. Amazon's African region is Cape Town; Microsoft's is in South Africa. For a company whose customers, regulator or programme are in Kenya, Tanzania or Nigeria, that leaves owned hardware in-country as one of the few ways to put a specific machine inside a specific border — and it is the option procurement finds easiest to verify, because a building has an address.
Each of the three cities is where its country's networks actually meet. Kenya's subsea capacity lands at Mombasa and runs roughly 480 km inland to Nairobi, where KIXP has exchanged domestic traffic since 2002 across 136 peer networks and 2.9 Tbps of capacity. Dar es Salaam has no inland haul at all, because SEACOM, EASSy and SEAS come ashore in the city itself, and 13,820 km of state backbone fibre carries traffic to the regions. Lagos is the densest landing point in West Africa with eight subsea systems ashore, and IXPN — founded in 2006 to stop Nigerian networks exchanging packets via London — now runs 13 points of presence across seven states with more than 130 connected networks and peak domestic traffic past 2 Tbps by March 2026.
The distance you are removing is bigger than the map implies. Paths between African networks have long been hauled north to Europe and handed back rather than exchanged locally, and published measurement research puts intercontinental round trips from African networks at roughly 100 to 400 ms. A request from Lagos to Nairobi has commonly taken longer than the same request from Lagos to London. A South African facility is an international deployment from all three of these countries, which is exactly why putting the equipment in the country changes the numbers your users experience.
Two things about the buildings, because an international buyer will be asked both. The regions sit inside carrier-neutral, Tier III data centres operated by specialist facility companies, and Lineserve runs its own hardware, network and customer racks within them. And your rack does not sit alone: cloud servers, dedicated servers and object storage in the same region are reachable from it, so the ledger on your own hardware and the object store holding its archive can be in the same city and on the same account.
3
Colocation cities — 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
If you do not need to own it
Colocation earns its place when the asset has to be yours: hardware you have already bought, an appliance a vendor will only support on its own chassis, a security posture that requires equipment nobody else has ever had root on. If what you actually need is the machine rather than the asset, dedicated servers in the same three cities remove the shipment, the clearance and the spares shelf entirely, from $309 a month.
Ask any facility the same questions
Power topology and density per rack, cooling, the physical access procedure and who may use it, what remote hands includes, escalation out of hours, and what the SLA pays out when it is missed. Put them in writing to us and to everybody else you are quoted by, and compare the answers rather than the brochures. A buyer who is never going to visit the building should be the most demanding reader of those replies, not the least.
Logistics
Shipping hardware into a country you do not operate in
This is the part that decides whether your go-live date holds, and it is the part nobody writes down. The equipment has to leave a supplier or your own data centre, cross a border, clear a port, arrive at a building you have never been to, and be racked by people you have not met — against an elevation you drew somewhere else. None of that is difficult. All of it is sequential, which means the order you do it in is the whole game.
The shipment and the clearance
Server equipment landing in Kenya, Tanzania or Nigeria is an import: a freight forwarder, a clearing agent, and duty and import VAT assessed at the port of entry. Settle who your importer of record is before the boxes leave the supplier — your forwarder will ask, and clearance is the step most likely to move your go-live date. Start the paperwork against the shipment rather than the arrival, and expect air freight to be the answer whenever the rack has a date attached.
What to send us before it lands
An equipment list with the rated draw per unit, the rack elevation you want, the number of U it occupies, whether you need A and B feeds, what should be cross-connected to what, your IP and transit requirements, and the term you want. Then the practical half: the courier or forwarder, the tracking reference, the expected date, how many pallets and how it is packed. With that in hand we plan receiving, rack-and-stack and cabling around a date rather than around a guess.
Receiving, racking and cabling
The pallet arrives at the facility and is received against your list, so a missing rail kit is discovered at the loading bay rather than three days later. Engineers unbox, mount to your elevation, cable power and network, label to your naming scheme, and power up in the order you specify — controllers before nodes, storage before hypervisors, whatever your runbook says. You get back photographs of the finished rack, the port and IP assignments, and out-of-band access if your hardware provides it. Most customers are watching that first boot from another continent, which is exactly how it should work.
Remote hands, because you will not be visiting
After go-live, every physical task is a ticket rather than a flight: a power-cycle when the management interface stops answering, a cable move, a disk swap, a reseated card, a photograph of a status light somebody needs to see, a witnessed change during a maintenance window. Agree the authorisation list when the rack is commissioned — who may request hands on your equipment, and how we verify it is really them — because that is the control an owner of remote hardware most needs and most often forgets to set up.
Spares live in the country too
The one part of owning hardware that colocation does not remove. When your disk fails, it is your disk: think about where the replacement is, who ships it, and how long clearance takes for a single part rather than a pallet. Two habits make this painless — keep a small spares kit racked or shelved on site from day one, and buy hardware with a vendor support contract that has feet in the country. Send the spares with the original shipment and they clear once, with everything else.
Import duty, taxes and customs treatment on your equipment depend on your own shipment and your own status as importer — your forwarder and your adviser own that. Tell [email protected] when the shipment is due and what is in it, and the receiving is planned around it.
What's included
Built like a data centre, because it is one
Power, cooling, security, and connectivity engineered for uptime — the layers that are hard and expensive to build yourself, ready for your hardware to move into.
Redundant A+B power
Dual power feeds and UPS-backed distribution keep your equipment running through faults.
Resilient cooling
N+1 cooling and hot/cold-aisle containment hold temperature steady under full load.
Carrier-neutral connectivity
Reach multiple upstreams and peers — you're not locked to a single network.
Cross-connects
Direct physical links to carriers, peers, and your other cabinets within the facility.
Local IP transit
Blended, low-latency IP transit on the continent, with allowances that scale to your rack.
24/7 remote hands
Our on-site engineers reboot, recable, and install on your behalf, any hour.
Physical security
Access control, CCTV, and staffed facilities with audited entry to your space.
Free DDoS protection
Network-layer mitigation on your Lineserve transit at no extra cost.
Monitoring & reporting
Power, environmental, and network monitoring, with visibility into your footprint.
Regions & facilities
Tier III space, where you need it
Place your hardware in the metro closest to your users and keep your data in-country. carrier-neutral connectivity, Tier III facilities.
Kenya
Nairobi · ke-1a
~2 ms
typical, within metro
Tier III, carrier-neutral
Tanzania
Dar es Salaam · tz-1a
~6 ms
typical, within metro
Tier III, carrier-neutral
Nigeria
Lagos · ng-1a
~4 ms
typical, within metro
Tier III, carrier-neutral
Space availability varies by region — reservations are confirmed with our team.
Move in, your way
Ship it, rack it, connect it
Whatever your hardware, we make space for it. Choose your footprint, power configuration, and connectivity, and our team handles the install so your equipment is racked, powered, and online.
Space
From a single U to quarter, half, and full racks, up to private cages and suites.
Power
Single or redundant A+B feeds, sized in kW, metered fairly above your allowance.
Connectivity
Cross-connects to carriers and peers, plus blended local IP transit that scales.
Hands & logistics
Shipment receiving, racking, cabling, and 24/7 remote hands, handled for you.
Migrating an existing setup? Tell us your rack layout and power draw and we'll plan the move.
Talk to SalesUse cases
Why teams colocate with us
Data sovereignty
Keep regulated or sensitive data physically in-country, on hardware you own and control.
Disaster recovery
Stand up a resilient DR or backup site in a second region, close but independent.
Edge & network POP
Place equipment near your users or peering points to cut latency and transit cost.
Own-hardware economics
Run capital hardware you already own in a facility you don't have to build.
How it works
From shipment to online
Reserve your space
Choose a region, footprint, power, and connectivity, and we confirm availability.
Ship your hardware
Send your equipment to the facility; our team receives, racks, and cables it.
Connect & go live
Cross-connects and IP transit are provisioned, and you manage it remotely from there.
Power & network SLA
99.9%+
- Redundant A+B power and N+1 cooling, monitored around the clock
- 24/7 remote hands for reboots, recabling, and installs
- Service credits applied automatically when we miss the SLA
Support & reliability
Uptime engineered, hands on-site
Redundant power and cooling in Tier III facilities, backed by a 99.9%+ power and network SLA, with 24/7 remote hands. Reach a real engineer in your region and timezone.
Which do you need?
Own the hardware, or rent it
Both put your workload in our Tier III facilities, on our network, with local billing and support. The difference is who owns the servers. Here's how to choose.
The quote
What we need from you, and what comes back
Colocation is quoted rather than listed, because two customers with the same rack count rarely want the same thing. What moves the number is footprint, power, connectivity and term. Footprints run from a single U for a box or two, through a quarter rack and a half rack to a full rack, and on to private cages and suites for larger environments. Each footprint carries a power allowance sized to it, with draw above the allowance metered rather than estimated, and A and B feeds on the larger footprints. Cross-connects are included from a quarter rack up, remote hands from a half rack up, and every footprint carries an IP transit allowance.
Send the equipment list with the rated draw per unit, how many U it occupies, whether you need redundant feeds, what you want cross-connected, and how long you want the term to run. What comes back is a monthly figure in US dollars that your finance team can budget and your board can approve, settled by bank transfer or card. If your Kenyan, Tanzanian or Nigerian subsidiary is the entity that should hold the contract, that market quotes and invoices in KES, TZS or NGN instead — which is worth deciding before signature rather than after, because the term on a colocation contract is the longest thing you will sign with us.
The tax lines differ by country and by which entity buys. Kenya charges 16% VAT on hosting services, Tanzania 18% on the mainland with Zanzibar administered separately, and Nigeria 7.5%; which rate reaches your invoice follows which market bills you rather than which city the rack is in. Withholding is the question your CFO raises first on a multi-year contract: a Tanzanian business paying a non-resident for services withholds 15% of the gross consideration unless a double tax agreement reduces it, and a Nigerian payer is frequently a withholding agent filing a monthly schedule naming each supplier. Lineserve contracts as LINESERVE, INC., registered in Dover, Delaware — settle the treatment with your adviser before signature, and bring us into that conversation so the invoicing matches how you remit.
Two numbers decide the quote
Power draw per unit and rack layout. Measure the first rather than reading it off a label — rated draw and actual draw are frequently different animals, and a rack sized against nameplate figures is a rack you pay for twice. Count the second in U, including the switches, the patch panels and the space you want left for the next two years.
One contract, or one per country
Racks in two or three of the cities can sit on one account, one console and one USD invoice, which is one supplier relationship for your procurement to onboard. Or each subsidiary can hold its own contract in its own currency so the cost lands in the right ledger. Both work — decide before the first quote rather than after the first invoice.
Colocation is quoted per footprint. Send your rack layout, power draw, connectivity requirements and term to [email protected] and you get a figure, a lead time and a receiving plan.
Data residency
The hardware stays yours; the jurisdiction is the point
Colocation is the most literal answer available to a residency requirement. Not a tenancy, not a share of a cluster, not a service commitment — your equipment, in a building in a named city, in a named country, running software nobody else has ever touched. When a customer's security review, a donor's data annex or a regulator's directive asks where the data is, the answer is a physical machine you own inside a border you can name.
The three laws behind that question are not the same. Kenya's Data Protection Act, No. 24 of 2019 is enforced by the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner: sections 48 and 49 attach conditions to transferring personal data out of Kenya, and Regulation 26 of the 2021 General Regulations requires processing through a server and data centre located in Kenya — or at least one serving copy stored in one — for six named purposes, among them public finance systems, basic education, and primary or secondary health care. Tanzania is the strictest: under the Personal Data Protection Act, 2022, personal data leaves the country on a permit from the Personal Data Protection Commission, applied for with the recipient, the data categories, the purpose, the destination and the security arrangements at the far end. That is prior authorisation, not self-assessment.
Nigeria carries the hardest date. Section 41 of the Data Protection Act 2023, administered by the Nigeria Data Protection Commission, restricts transfer of personal data out of Nigeria to cases where the recipient is covered by an adequate law, binding corporate rules, contractual clauses, a code of conduct or a certification mechanism. On top of it, a Central Bank of Nigeria circular of 15 June 2026 directs that payment transaction data generated within Nigeria be stored and managed in Nigeria, with full compliance from 1 January 2027, covering banks, mobile money operators, fintechs, switching companies, payment service providers and super agents. For an institution that already owns its ledger and its archive, moving the same machines into Lagos is the most direct answer available: no re-platforming, no new operational model to certify.
Keep the equipment in one of the three countries and the data on it is held under that country's law — data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act, Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act or Nigeria's Data Protection Act. What Lineserve supplies is the physical location, the power, the cooling, the network and the people who can touch the machine. Registration, notices, lawful basis, breach reporting and your position under any sectoral directive stay with you — and in a colocation arrangement, where you operate the equipment and everything on it, more of the processing sits in your own hands than under a managed service.
The disaster-recovery copy is a transfer
A standby copy in a second country is sensible engineering and, for personal data, a regulated act. A replica of Tanzanian personal data in Nairobi or Lagos is a transfer out of Tanzania under the permit regime, and Nigerian payment data inside the CBN circular's scope carries its localisation position with the copy rather than leaving it behind with the original. Decide each destination deliberately; in-region object storage and a second footprint in the same city answer most of it without crossing a border.
The question worth asking every provider
Which building is my equipment in, and in which country is that building? One sentence, checkable answer. If your regulatory position depends on where the hardware physically is, then where the hardware physically is has stopped being a detail and become a specification.
Who racks here
Who ships hardware into these three countries
International colocation buyers look nothing like cloud buyers. They already own the equipment, they have an opinion about it, and something outside their architecture — a regulator, a customer, a licence, a vendor — is telling them which country it has to be in.
Financial institutions and payment processors
Core banking, switching, ledgers, HSMs and reconciliation servers, on hardware certified for the purpose and often on appliances a vendor supports on its own chassis. Nigeria puts a date on it: payment transaction data generated in the country is directed to be stored and managed there from 1 January 2027, which for an institution that already owns its stack makes shipping the same machines to Lagos the shortest path to the deadline.
Software vendors deploying into a customer's country
You sell a platform to a bank, a telco or a ministry whose tender requires the instance to be in-country, and running it inside their data centre puts your product beyond your own operational reach. Your own rack in their country keeps the deployment inside your support model and your monitoring, with hands available for the physical half.
Telecoms and network operators
Routers, switches, transmission gear, RADIUS and AAA, resolvers, mail relays and probes — equipment that has to be in the country to be useful at all, and that these teams have always owned rather than rented. They read a traceroute before they read a page, and interconnection comes up in the first ten minutes.
Programmes and institutions with equipment already funded
A donor grant, a government programme or a research project that bought hardware as a capital item and now needs somewhere for it to live that is not a ministry basement or a project office. The equipment is usually fine. The building it is in is the problem, and the funding rarely stretches to fixing a building.
Companies with a rack in a local office
The most common conversation on this page. A regional office has a comms room with a rack in it, one air-conditioner as the single point of failure, a UPS nobody has load-tested, and a generator that belongs to the landlord — while head office is on another continent and finds out about outages by email. Moving the same equipment into a facility changes who is responsible for the power at three in the morning.
Hardware nobody else may have touched
Some security postures require equipment that has never been under another party's root, or a specific HSM, or a build your own auditors witnessed. Colocation is the only shape that satisfies that in a country you have no operation in: you buy it, you build it, you seal it, we rack it and never log in.
Getting here
From a rack on another continent, or from an office in the country
From a facility outside the country
Today the equipment sits in Frankfurt, London or Johannesburg and serves users in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam or Lagos across an ocean or a border, with the country's personal data outside the country. The move is a shipment and a maintenance window. Decommission cleanly and label everything as it comes out of the old rack; ship against a customs plan you started before the boxes moved; give us the arrival date, the elevation and the power-up order. The hardware, the operating systems, the configuration and the data are unchanged at the far end. What changes is the country, the distance to your users, and who is in the building when a fan fails.
From an office comms room in the country
The hardware is usually not the problem. The building is: a single power feed, one air-conditioning unit, a UPS of unknown runtime and a generator that answers to the landlord — while the team responsible sits in a different time zone and hears about failures after the customers do. The audit before the move is short: rack elevation, real power draw per unit, what talks to what, and who is on the access list. Then a date, a truck across the city, engineers racking against your elevation, a checked power-up, and a cutover window you choose instead of one an outage chooses for you. No customs and no freight — the equipment stays in the country it was already in, in a building designed for it.
The real alternative to this page is usually another year of the office rack, or building power and cooling yourself in a country you do not live in. Send [email protected] your equipment list, rated draw, elevation and term, and you get a quote, a lead time and a receiving plan.
FAQ
Questions, answered
Rack space, redundant power up to your allowance, cooling, physical security, and a network port with an IP transit allowance. Cross-connects and remote hands are available, bundled on larger footprints.
Yes. Ship your equipment to the facility and our team receives it, racks it, cables it, and brings it online. Remote hands handle changes after that.
Each footprint includes a power allowance — 500 W on a quarter rack, 1 kW on a half rack, 3 kW on a full rack. Draw above the allowance is billed at $500 per kW per month, and larger footprints include redundant A+B feeds.
Yes. You can cross-connect to multiple carriers and peers, or use our blended local IP transit — you're never locked to a single upstream.
Yes. That's a core reason teams colocate with us. Your hardware and data stay physically in the region you choose, on the continent.
Colocation is offered on standard commitment terms that scale with your footprint. Talk to sales for terms on quarter, half, full racks, and cages.
Yes. Connect colocated hardware to Lineserve Cloud Servers, Dedicated Servers, and Object Storage over private networking within a region for a hybrid setup.
Yes. The contract is with LINESERVE, INC., registered in Dover, Delaware, and quoted in US dollars. A local entity affects how you would prefer to be billed and taxed, and it may matter to your freight forwarder for the import, but it is not a condition of taking a footprint.
It is quoted per footprint, because footprint, power draw, connectivity and term all move the number. Send [email protected] your equipment list with the rated draw per unit, the space it occupies, what you want cross-connected and how long you want the term to run, and you get a monthly figure in US dollars.
From a single U for a box or two, through a quarter rack and a half rack to a full rack, and on to private cages and suites for larger environments. Each footprint carries a power allowance sized to it, with draw above the allowance metered. Cross-connects are included from a quarter rack up and remote hands from a half rack up.
Our engineers. They receive the pallet against your equipment list, unbox, mount to your rack elevation, cable power and network, label to your naming scheme and power up in the order you specify, then send you photographs and the port and IP assignments. Tell us the arrival date and the tracking reference in advance so receiving is planned rather than improvised.
Your freight forwarder and clearing agent, working to your instructions as importer of record. Duty and import VAT are assessed at the port of entry on your shipment. Settle that before the equipment leaves the supplier — it is the step most likely to move a go-live date, and it is far easier to arrange in advance than to unpick at a port.
It is the normal case for this product, and it is what remote hands exist for. Physical work is raised as a ticket: power-cycles, cable moves, disk swaps, reseated cards, inspections, photographs, witnessed changes in a maintenance window. Agree the authorisation list when the rack is commissioned, so it is clear in advance who may ask for hands on your equipment.
It is your hardware, so the part is yours — that is the trade you made when you chose to own the asset. Our engineers do the physical work. Keep a small spares kit on site from day one, shipped and cleared with the original consignment, and hold a vendor support contract with reach in the country. If you would rather hardware failure was somebody else's problem entirely, dedicated servers in the same three cities include replacement.
Yes, and you should. A spare disk, a power supply and a spare rail kit sent with the original shipment clear once, arrive once and sit metres from the machine that will need them, instead of starting a new import at the worst possible moment.
The one your users, your customer or your regulator is in — Nairobi for Kenya, Dar es Salaam for Tanzania, Lagos for Nigeria. There is no useful midpoint between them: each country's data-protection regime looks at its own border, and the network paths between the three cities are international paths.
Yes, in the precise sense: the data sits on your own hardware, in that country, under that country's law — data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act, Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act or Nigeria's Data Protection Act. Compliance under those laws is yours as controller, and in a colocation arrangement you operate the equipment, so more of the processing sits with you than under a managed service.
Technically yes, and the three regions run on one account. Treat it as a regulated decision for personal data: a copy of Tanzanian personal data outside Tanzania needs a permit from the Personal Data Protection Commission, and Nigerian payment data inside the Central Bank's localisation directive takes its position with the copy.
Yes. Cloud servers, dedicated servers and S3-compatible object storage run in the same regions and sit on the same account and invoice, so an application on your own hardware can use an object store in the same city — which is also the simplest way to keep backups in the country the equipment is in.
A power allowance sized to the footprint, with draw above it metered and A and B feeds on the larger footprints, plus an IP transit allowance and cross-connects from a quarter rack up. Tell us the rated draw per unit and what you need cross-connected to, and the quote is built around your actual configuration rather than a template.
In US dollars, by bank transfer or card. If your Kenyan, Tanzanian or Nigerian subsidiary should hold the contract, that market quotes and invoices in KES, TZS or NGN. Terms, deposits and the payment schedule are agreed with [email protected] before anything ships.
Displayed and quoted prices exclude tax. Domestic VAT is 16% in Kenya, 18% on the Tanzanian mainland and 7.5% in Nigeria, and which rate reaches your invoice follows which market bills you. On a multi-year contract, ask your adviser about withholding before signature — Tanzania withholds 15% on payments to non-residents for services unless a treaty reduces it, and Nigerian payers are frequently withholding agents.
Customer references are available under NDA. Tell [email protected] what you are shipping and which country it is going to, and you will be pointed at the closest match.
Move your hardware closer to home
Tier III space, redundant power, carrier-neutral connectivity, and hands on the ground — with your data kept in-country and billed in local currency.
99.9%+ power SLA · Carrier-neutral · Data stays in-country