ke-1a Nairobi · tz-1a Dar es Salaam · ng-1a Lagos
Where your data lives in Kenya, Tanzania and Nigeria
Compute, storage and the network endpoint of each region sit inside the country that region serves. What you are buying is a location, so what follows is geography rather than adjectives: where each country's international capacity comes ashore, how far it travels to reach the racks, where domestic networks hand traffic to each other, and which law the data sits under once it lands. Every claim here is one you can check from your own desk, and the last section explains how.
3
live regions
Tier III
facilities
Carrier-neutral
connectivity
<6 ms
latency within each metro
The footprint
Three metros, on the ground today
Each region is a physically distinct facility with its own power, cooling, connectivity, and network endpoint. Choose where your workloads and data live.
Nairobi
Kenya · ke-1a
~2 ms
typical, within metro
in-country region
Dar es Salaam
Tanzania · tz-1a
~6 ms
typical, within metro
in-country region
Lagos
Nigeria · ng-1a
~4 ms
typical, within metro
in-country region
Network
Three countries, three different shapes of internet
Start with what is missing. No hyperscaler runs a full cloud region in Kenya, Tanzania or Nigeria. Nairobi and Lagos carry edge infrastructure — content delivery, interconnect, a local zone — and edge caches objects; it does not run your database or hold your customer records. Tanzania has neither edge nor region. So the practical choice in all three is between a region on another continent and a region in the country, and how each one behaves depends on facts that differ more than the map suggests.
Kenya's international capacity arrives on the coast. TEAMS, SEACOM, EASSy, LION2, DARE1 and PEACE all land at Mombasa, and the Communications Authority of Kenya put lit international bandwidth at 28,130 Gbps for the quarter to March 2026, 17,759 Gbps of it in use. Not one of those cables reaches Nairobi: the capacity is hauled roughly 480 km inland over terrestrial fibre to the city where the carriers, the exchange and the customers actually are. Domestic traffic never makes that trip. It is exchanged inside Nairobi at KIXP, the neutral exchange TESPOK has run since February 2002, where PeeringDB records 136 peer networks, 151 connections, 2.9 Tbps of connected capacity and 84% IPv6 adoption, with Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, Meta and Starlink present alongside Safaricom, Faiba, Zuku and Poa. Lineserve peers there.
Dar es Salaam has no inland haul at all. SEACOM, EASSy and SEAS come ashore in the city itself, and Dar es Salaam is one of 2Africa's named landing points, with further landings at Tanga and Zanzibar. Tanzanian networks hand traffic to each other in the same city, at TIX, run since 2003 by TISPA, the country's service-provider association: PeeringDB lists 32 networks, 33 connections and 798G of connected capacity at roughly 90% IPv6, with Akamai, Meta, Cloudflare, TTCL and Liquid among the participants. Inland, the National ICT Broadband Backbone does the rest — 13,820 km of state fibre reaching every region of the country and crossing into six neighbours — so one origin in the commercial capital serves Mwanza, Arusha, Dodoma and Mbeya over domestic infrastructure.
Lagos is the densest cable landing point in West Africa: eight subsea systems come ashore in and around the city, among them SAT-3, WACS, ACE, MainOne, Equiano and 2Africa, which lands at Lekki. The exchange there has a founding story worth knowing, because it explains what this class of infrastructure exists to fix. Two Nigerian networks with nowhere domestic to meet used to swap packets in London, so a request crossing a few kilometres of Lagos crossed a continent twice. The Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria was founded in 2006 by the Nigerian Communications Commission with the country's ISP association to close that gap, and now runs 13 points of presence across seven states with more than 130 connected networks; peak domestic traffic across it passed 2 Tbps by March 2026.
What a local exchange changes is easy to state and easy to underrate: two networks present at the same exchange hand traffic straight to each other inside the city, rather than paying an international carrier to take it out of the country and bring it back. The job is finished nowhere. Published probe data still commonly shows Lagos reaching London in roughly 110 ms while Lagos reaches Nairobi in roughly 200, because a great deal of traffic between two African cities is still carried through Europe on the way. Proximity on a map is a poor predictor of proximity on a network, and the only reliably short path is the one that never leaves the metro.
Which reduces to one sentence. A request from a user in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam or Lagos reaches a machine in the same city and comes back — typically in single-digit milliseconds, for every image, script, API call and database query the page makes — instead of paying for an ocean crossing on each one.
0
Hyperscale cloud regions in Kenya, Tanzania or Nigeria
136
Networks peering at KIXP, Nairobi (PeeringDB)
798G
Capacity connected at TIX, Dar es Salaam (PeeringDB)
13
IXPN points of presence, across seven Nigerian states
"In Nairobi" and "on the exchange" are two questions
KIXP is not a single room — it is present in four Nairobi facilities, which is why a provider can be genuinely in the right city and still hand your domestic traffic to a transit carrier. Put both questions to anyone quoting you hosting in these countries, and treat a vague answer to the second as an answer.
What the buildings are
The regions sit inside carrier-neutral, Tier III data centres run by specialist facility operators, with Lineserve running its own hardware and network inside them. That is the normal split at this end of the market, and it answers what procurement is really asking: which country the building stands in, and who has physical access to the machine.
The day four cables failed
On 14 March 2024, WACS, ACE, MainOne and SAT-3 all failed near Côte d'Ivoire. Connectivity degraded across thirteen countries, Nigerian bank customers could not transact, and one operator declared force majeure with repairs estimated at up to eight weeks. An application in Frankfurt goes dark for its Lagos users on a day like that. One in Lagos, serving Lagos users over Nigerian networks, is not asking the subsea path for permission.
Facility detail
Inside our regions
Three regions, each in the country it serves. Where each one sits on its national network is what decides how it behaves. Certifications and standards below belong to the facility operator; Lineserve operates within these carrier-neutral, Tier III facilities.
Nairobi (ke-1a)
Location
Nairobi, Kenya
Facility
Tier III, carrier-neutral
International capacity
Kenya's international capacity comes ashore at Mombasa and is backhauled roughly 480 km inland to Nairobi.
Local exchange
KIXP, operated by TESPOK across four Nairobi facilities, carries 136 peer networks and 2.9 Tbps of capacity. Lineserve peers there, so traffic to another network on the exchange is handed over inside Nairobi.
Data residency
Your data is held in Kenya, giving you data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act.
Storage endpoint
ke-1a.s3.lineserve.net
Dar es Salaam (tz-1a)
Location
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
Facility
Tier III, carrier-neutral
International capacity
Tanzania's international capacity comes ashore at Dar es Salaam, and the national backbone reaches inland from there.
Local exchange
TIX, the Tanzania Internet Exchange, sits in Dar es Salaam and is where Tanzanian networks hand traffic to each other rather than routing it abroad.
Data residency
Your data is held in Tanzania, giving you data residency for Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act.
Storage endpoint
tz-1a.s3.lineserve.net
Lagos (ng-1a)
Location
Lagos, Nigeria
Facility
Tier III, carrier-neutral
International capacity
Nigeria's international capacity comes ashore at Lagos, which is where the country's subsea systems terminate.
Local exchange
IXPN, the Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria, sits in Lagos and keeps traffic between Nigerian networks inside the country.
Data residency
Your data is held in Nigeria, giving you data residency for Nigeria's Data Protection Act (NDPA).
Storage endpoint
ng-1a.s3.lineserve.net
Built for uptime
The standards behind every region
Our regions operate in facilities engineered for continuous availability — the layers that are expensive and slow to build, already in place.
Tier III facilities
Concurrently maintainable power and cooling, so maintenance never means downtime.
Redundant power
Dual A+B feeds, UPS protection, and generator backup to ride through grid faults.
Resilient cooling
N+1 precision cooling with containment to hold temperature under full load.
Physical security
Access control, CCTV, and staffed, audited entry to every space.
Fire detection & suppression
Early-warning detection and suppression systems protecting the floor.
24/7 monitoring
Power, environmental, and network monitoring around the clock, with on-site response.
Connectivity
Carrier-neutral, close to the cables
Our facilities are carrier-neutral, so you're never locked to a single network. Blended local IP transit keeps latency low and traffic on the continent, with cross-connects to the carriers and peers you need.
Carrier-neutral
Choose among multiple upstreams and peers within the facility.
Local IP transit
Blended, low-latency transit from regional providers, with room to scale.
Subsea cable access
Each region sits where its country's international capacity comes ashore — Mombasa for Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, and Lagos.
Cross-connects & peering
Direct links to carriers, IXPs, and your own cabinets.
Sovereignty
Your data stays on the continent
For regulated, sensitive, or public-sector workloads, jurisdiction matters. Because our facilities are physically in-region, your data can stay in the country you choose — under laws you understand, close to the users it serves.
Talk to Sales about data residencyWhat's next
More regions, zone by zone
We're extending the footprint across the continent, placing infrastructure closer to more users. These zones are in progress.
Put your workloads where your users are
Tier III facilities, redundant everything, and data that stays in-country — with local billing and support.
99.9% uptime SLA · Carrier-neutral · Data stays in-country
Jurisdiction
A region boundary is a legal boundary, and that is most of what you are buying
Three countries, three statutes, three regulators. 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. Data you place in ke-1a, tz-1a or ng-1a is held in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam or Lagos, under that country's law, and it stays there until you move it. That is data residency for those three statutes, and it is the part a hosting provider actually supplies.
They are not equally strict, and the differences decide architecture rather than paperwork. Tanzania is the tightest: 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, and the Commission may approve, ask for more, or refuse. Kenya's sections 48 and 49 allow a transfer where appropriate safeguards are demonstrated, and Regulation 26 goes further for six named purposes — among them civil registration and identity, elections, public finance administration, basic education and primary or secondary health care — which want at least one serving copy held in Kenya. Nigeria's section 41 works through named instruments: adequacy, binding corporate rules, contractual clauses, a code of conduct or a certification mechanism.
Nigeria also has the only hard date. A Central Bank circular of 15 June 2026 directs that payment transaction data generated in Nigeria be stored and managed there from 1 January 2027, reaching banks, microfinance banks, mobile money operators, fintechs, switching companies, payment service providers and super agents.
There is a mirror to all this that buyers based elsewhere find late. Kenya's Act reaches a controller neither established nor ordinarily resident in Kenya that processes the personal data of people located in Kenya. A company in Stockholm or Seattle with Kenyan users sits inside that Act whether its servers stand in Frankfurt or Nairobi. Hosting abroad moves the machine; the obligation stays where it was, and in-country hosting simply takes the cross-border transfer analysis off the table for the records that never leave.
A copy in a second region is a transfer
All three regions sit on one account and one API, which makes a standby or a backup target a configuration rather than a project. Make the call deliberately: a copy of Tanzanian personal data held in Lagos is a transfer out of Tanzania under the permit regime above. Machine images, static assets and telemetry stripped of personal data raise no such question, and they are usually most of what you wanted replicated.
Who you are contracting with
LINESERVE, INC., registered in Dover, Delaware. What stands in Kenya, Tanzania and Nigeria is the infrastructure, the data you put in it, and the local currency billing available in each of the three markets. Ask [email protected] for a data processing agreement and the sub-processor position before your legal review starts rather than after it stalls.
Residency is what a region supplies. Your own lawful basis, notices, registrations and breach handling travel with you into any country — and they are shorter conversations when the personal data never crossed a border.
Choosing
One region, two, or all three
Region choice is settled by where the users are and where the data has to be held. These are the shapes that come up, in the order people arrive at them.
Your users are in one of the three countries
Take that country's region and leave the rest of your estate alone. The user-facing tier, the cache and a read replica go in-country; the control plane, CI and the warehouse stay where they work. The most common first deployment by a wide margin, and a day's work rather than a migration.
Your users are in two or three of them
Run two or three regions. There is no useful midpoint between Nairobi and Lagos, since traffic between African cities frequently transits Europe, so one origin serving both is a compromise for both. Per-unit prices are identical everywhere, and the second region is the same deployment with a different region code.
A contract or a regulator named the country
Sometimes the region is chosen before the architecture: a customer's data processing agreement, a tender clause, a bank's onboarding questionnaire, the Nigerian payments circular with its 2027 date. Deploy the tier holding the named data in the named country, and write down what is in it — that list is what you will be asked for.
You want a standby somewhere else
Backups, snapshots and a warm standby in a second region are a configuration on the same account, with object storage on a per-region endpoint so the bucket sits in the same city as the thing it protects. Where the data is personal data, read the transfer note above first: the technical decision and the legal one are not the same decision.
Your team is nowhere near any of them
Normal, and it changes nothing. Your engineers reach the console, the API and SSH over the same internet as everyone else, and that path is intercontinental whatever anyone does. The region exists for your users and your data. Nairobi and Dar es Salaam run on UTC+3, Lagos on UTC+1, with no daylight saving, so the offset you learn in January holds in July.
You need your own hardware in the building
Colocation in all three cities is quoted per footprint rather than listed, because rack units, power per rack, cross-connects and remote hands vary too much for a price card. Ship the equipment and it is racked for you, and colocated hardware can sit on private networking beside cloud instances in the same region.
Verifying
How to check a location claim from another continent
Test it from where you are, in about ten minutes
Location claims are cheap to make and cheap to check, which is a good combination. Traceroute to the address from your own network and watch where the path terminates, then run the same trace from inside the country — a public looking glass, a probe network, or the smallest instance you can rent there for an hour — and compare the two shapes. Look the address up and see which networks announce the prefix and which country the registry places it in. Then ask the provider which city the machine is in and whether they will put it in writing. For a Lineserve instance the answers are Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and Lagos.
What your customer's security review will ask
The questionnaire is much the same in Amsterdam, Austin and Abu Dhabi. Which country the building stands in. Who has physical access to the machine, and under what process. Which law governs the data. Where the backups are held, and whether that answer differs from the first one. What the uptime SLA pays when it is missed, and who has to claim it. What happens to the data at termination. Whether there is a data processing agreement and a sub-processor list. Every one has an answer here, and collecting them from [email protected] before you circulate the architecture beats collecting them after.
Customer references are available under NDA. Tell [email protected] what you are building and which of the three countries it is for, and you will be pointed at the closest match.
FAQ
Questions, answered
ke-1a is in Nairobi, tz-1a in Dar es Salaam and ng-1a in Lagos. Compute, storage and the network endpoint for each region are in that city, and an instance stays there unless you move it.
Traceroute to the address from your own network, then again from inside the country using a looking glass, a probe network or an hour-old instance rented locally, and compare where the paths terminate. Look up which networks announce the prefix. Any provider's location claim survives that or it does not.
No. Amazon's African region is Cape Town and Microsoft's is in South Africa. Nairobi and Lagos carry edge infrastructure with the compute in another country, and Tanzania has neither edge nor region. Data held with a global provider by a business in any of the three is generally held outside that country.
Kenya's at Mombasa — TEAMS, SEACOM, EASSy, LION2, DARE1 and PEACE — then roughly 480 km inland to Nairobi. Tanzania's in Dar es Salaam itself, where SEACOM, EASSy and SEAS land and 2Africa has a named landing point. Nigeria's in and around Lagos, where eight subsea systems come ashore.
In Kenya, yes: Lineserve peers at KIXP, run by TESPOK, where PeeringDB records 136 peer networks, 151 connections and 2.9 Tbps of connected capacity. Each region also sits in the city where its country's own exchange operates — TIX in Dar es Salaam since 2003, and IXPN in Lagos, with 13 points of presence across seven states.
For traffic between your instance and a network present at the same exchange, the path is domestic instead of a trip to a European interconnection point and back. It applies to the networks that are actually there, which in these cities covers the large operators and the big content networks. Structural rather than magical, and it is the difference between a page that feels local and one that does not.
By where your users are and where the data has to be held: Kenyan in ke-1a, Tanzanian in tz-1a, Nigerian in ng-1a. If you serve two, run two — traffic between African cities frequently transits Europe, so there is no useful midpoint. Per-unit prices are the same everywhere, so the choice is architectural.
Yes: one account, one API, one bill, with the region chosen per instance and object storage on per-region endpoints. Where you replicate personal data, treat the copy as a cross-border transfer under the origin country's law.
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.
No. Kenya's Act reaches a controller neither established nor ordinarily resident in Kenya that processes the personal data of people located in Kenya, and the other two regimes have their own reach. Moving the servers moves the hardware; in-country hosting removes the cross-border transfer question for the data that stays.
No local company is needed — the account is yours wherever you are and the region is a choice at deploy time. The contracting entity is LINESERVE, INC., registered in Dover, Delaware. You own the data you put in a region and remain its controller; ask [email protected] for a data processing agreement.
Cloud servers and VPS on Linux or Windows, dedicated servers, managed Kubernetes and S3-compatible object storage on per-region endpoints, behind a published 99.9% uptime SLA with always-on DDoS mitigation, snapshots and scheduled backups. Colocation in all three cities is quoted per footprint.
That path is intercontinental and always will be, for every provider with infrastructure in these cities. The region is for your users in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and Lagos, whose in-metro round trips are typically single-digit milliseconds.