File Storage — hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos
File Storage
One file system, mounted everywhere.
A fully managed NFS file system, mounted by thousands of instances simultaneously. It grows elastically from gigabytes to a petabyte and is replicated across zones — so every server sees the same files, with no capacity to provision.
- NFSv4.1, full POSIX
- Elastic — pay for what you store
- Three locally-hosted regions — Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos
- Data sovereignty — your data stays in-country
- 99.99% availability SLA
Launching soon · Local billing in KES, TZS & NGN
Pricing
Pay for what you store, nothing more
Three storage classes, one per-GB price each. No pre-provisioning, no minimums — capacity follows your data, measured hourly. In your currency, no forex.
| Storage class | Price /GB/mo | Throughput | Latency |
|---|---|---|---|
| UniversalPopularGeneral-purpose shared storage for most workloads. | $0.21 | 100 MB/s, burst to 1 GB/s | ~2 ms |
| FastAnalytics, ML training data, media pipelines. | $0.36 | 500 MB/s, up to 10 GB/s provisioned | <1 ms |
| BasicInfrequently accessed files, archives, backups. | $0.024 | 100 MB/s | 10–50 ms |
You are billed on the data actually stored, measured hourly — there is no capacity to pre-provision. Fast provisioned throughput is $0.05 per MB/s, Basic reads are $0.01/GB, and snapshots are $0.05/GB/mo. Prices exclude VAT; local currency figures are indicative and settled at checkout.
The platform
Everything shared storage should be
Managed, elastic, and replicated — mounted by your whole fleet, with no file server to run.
Fully managed
No NFS servers to provision, patch, or fail over — we run the whole file system for you.
Elastic scaling
Capacity grows and shrinks with your data, from gigabytes to a petabyte, with nothing to provision.
Multi-AZ replication
Every file is synchronously replicated across availability zones and survives the loss of a zone.
Unlimited concurrent mounts
Thousands of instances mount the same file system at once, with real-time consistency across them.
POSIX-compliant NFSv4.1
Full file locking, permissions, symlinks, and hard links — your apps work unchanged.
Encryption everywhere
AES-256 at rest and TLS in transit, with keys managed for you or brought yourself.
Lifecycle policies
Auto-tier cold files down to Basic and save up to 60% without moving a thing.
Snapshots
Instant, incremental snapshots let you restore a whole file system or a single file in seconds.
Access points
Per-tenant roots and permissions give each app or team its own view of the file system.
Regions
Nairobi, Dar es Salaam or Lagos — and what decides it
The rule is unglamorous and it holds nearly everywhere: put the workload in the country whose users and whose records it serves. Per-unit prices are identical in all three regions, so the decision is geography and law rather than cost — and there is no useful midpoint, because traffic between the three cities is still commonly carried through Europe.
ke-1a is for Kenyan users and Kenyan records, and for regional teams whose head office is already in Nairobi. Every Kenyan subsea cable — TEAMS, SEACOM, EASSy, LION2, DARE1 and PEACE — comes ashore at Mombasa, and that capacity is carried roughly 480 km inland to the city where the carriers and the customers are. Domestic traffic never makes that trip: it is exchanged inside Nairobi at KIXP, the neutral exchange TESPOK has run since 2002, with 136 peer networks and 2.9 Tbps of connected capacity. Lineserve peers there.
tz-1a is for Tanzanian users, and it is where moving an origin changes the most: Tanzania has no content-delivery edge of its own, so a Dar es Salaam viewer is served from another country however the CDN is configured. There is no inland haul either — SEACOM, EASSy and SEAS come ashore in the city itself, and Dar es Salaam is a named landing point on 2Africa. Tanzanian networks meet at TIX, run since 2003 by the country's service-provider association, and 13,820 km of state fibre carries one origin on to Mwanza, Arusha and Dodoma.
ng-1a is for scale and for regulated Nigerian workloads. Eight subsea systems land in and around Lagos, among them MainOne, SAT-3, WACS, Equiano and 2Africa, which comes ashore at Lekki. Nigerian networks exchange domestic traffic at IXPN, founded in 2006 to stop domestic packets being hauled to London and now running 13 points of presence across seven states. Lagos also has a date attached: a Central Bank circular directs payment transaction data generated in Nigeria to be stored there from 1 January 2027.
All three give a buyer based elsewhere the same pair of things: a request from a user in the city reaches a machine in that city, typically in single-digit milliseconds, and the records it touches sit under one named country's law.
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
Use cases
Built for shared workloads
Shared web content
Every server sees the same uploads, themes, and media — no rsync, no drift, no sticky sessions.
Kubernetes RWX volumes
Many pods, one volume. The CSI driver gives you ReadWriteMany persistent volumes out of the box.
ML & analytics
Share datasets across GPU workers with high-throughput reads, no copying between nodes.
CI & dev environments
Shared source, build artifacts, and caches across runners and workspaces, live for every job.
How it works
Shared storage in three steps
Create a file system
Pick a storage class — Universal, Fast, or Basic. There is no size to provision.
Mount over NFS
Run one mount command on any instance — or request a RWX volume in Kubernetes.
Store and share
Capacity follows your data as it grows, and lifecycle policies tier cold files down.
Uptime SLA
99.9%
- Service credits applied automatically when we miss the SLA
- Measured monthly, per region, on network and power availability
- Tier III colocation facilities across all live regions
Support
You are on a different continent from your infrastructure
That is the real reservation, and it is answerable with what exists. Architecture, quotes, contracts, a data processing agreement, the registered names and tax identifiers that have to appear on your invoices: [email protected], in writing, in a thread you can forward to your own legal and finance people. Running services are driven from the console, the API and the ticket system on your account. Two phone lines are published for the region — +254 119 039 063 in Kenya and +255 761 847 121 in Tanzania.
Scheduling across the distance is the practical problem, and the arithmetic is friendlier than it looks. 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 gap between your clock and theirs moves only when your own clocks change, and a window agreed in June still means what you thought it meant in December. From London, Nairobi is three hours ahead in winter and two in summer, and Lagos an hour ahead in winter and level in summer. From New York in July, a 09:00 call is 14:00 in Lagos.
Most of what would be a phone call elsewhere is a call you make yourself. Building, resizing, rebooting, snapshotting and rebuilding an instance are API and console operations that behave identically at three in the morning your time or theirs, and a browser console reaches a machine that has lost its own networking. What needs a person in the building is a physical fault — and that person is there already.
Why Lineserve
Managed NFS beats running your own
Running your own NFS server means patching, capacity planning, and failovers when a node dies. A managed, elastic file system takes all of that off your plate.
FAQ
Questions, answered
A Block Storage volume attaches to one instance, like a disk. A file system mounts on thousands of instances at once over NFS, with every mount seeing the same files in real time. Use Block for databases; use File when fleets share data.
NFSv4.1 with full POSIX semantics — file locking, permissions, hard and symbolic links. Any Linux distribution mounts it natively; macOS and Windows work through their NFS clients.
There's nothing to provision. The file system grows and shrinks with the data you store, from gigabytes to a petabyte, and you pay only for what you actually use, measured hourly.
Yes. The CSI driver supports dynamic provisioning and ReadWriteMany (RWX) volumes, so many pods across many nodes can share the same persistent volume.
Universal gives a 100 MB/s baseline with bursts to 1 GB/s — right for most workloads. Fast starts at 500 MB/s with provisioned throughput up to 10 GB/s and sub-millisecond latency for analytics, ML training, and media pipelines.
Set a policy and files that go unused — say for 30 days — move automatically to the cheaper Basic class, cutting storage costs by up to 60%. The move is transparent; applications keep the same paths.
Yes. Every file system is replicated across multiple availability zones within the region at no extra cost, backed by a 99.99% availability SLA. Cross-region replication is available for disaster recovery.
Point-in-time snapshots are instant and incremental. Restore individual files from a read-only mount or roll back the whole file system, on demand or on a schedule.
Yes. Connect over VPN or a direct link and on-prem machines mount the file system exactly like cloud instances — useful for hybrid setups and migrations.
Your data stays in the region you deploy to. Across our data centres in Nairobi (Kenya), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), and Lagos (Nigeria) it never has to leave the continent — deploy in the country closest to your users and your data is held there.
In whichever of our three regions you choose — Nairobi (ke-1a), Dar es Salaam (tz-1a), or Lagos (ng-1a). Your content is stored and served from that in-country facility.
Pay in USD by card or bank transfer — or switch to our Kenya, Tanzania, or Nigeria market to pay locally in KES, TZS, or NGN with methods like M-Pesa.
You can view and pay in USD, or switch to a local market to pay in KES (Kenya), TZS (Tanzania), or NGN (Nigeria). You're settled in the currency you choose at checkout.
Shared storage for your whole fleet, almost here
Managed NFS is launching soon, close to your users. Talk to us for early access, and pay in local currency with no card required to start.
Launching soon · 99.99% availability SLA · Local billing in KES, TZS & NGN