Will the invoice work for my VAT return?

Lineserve Limited is registered for VAT in Kenya, so what you receive is a Kenyan tax invoice showing the 16% separately rather than a foreign receipt. Send sales@lineserve.net your KRA PIN and registered name before you order, so the invoicing requirements are set up with the account.

Can I talk to an existing Kenyan customer before committing?

Customer references are available under NDA. Ask sales@lineserve.net or +254 119 039 063 and the team will arrange one against the sector and workload you are buying for.

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LINESERVE

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Nairobi — ke-1a, live now

Cloud hosting in Kenya, on servers in Nairobi

A Nairobi region, a shilling price, and a Kenyan tax invoice at the end of the month.

Buying infrastructure from abroad costs a Kenyan business three things at once: a dollar card it may not have, an exchange rate nobody can forecast, and a receipt its accountant has to argue about. None of those is on the table here. The price is a shilling price, you settle it with M-Pesa, bank transfer or card, and the supplier is Lineserve Limited — a company registered for VAT in Kenya, with a Nairobi office and a Nairobi phone number. The machine is in Nairobi too: region ke-1a, live today. Cloud servers start at KES 1,389 a month, a Linux VPS at KES 2,195, a dedicated LineServe Core 1 at KES 46,350.

Servers in Nairobi — region ke-1a, live now
Every price quoted and billed in KES, by M-Pesa, bank transfer or card
Lineserve Limited, registered for VAT in Kenya
Data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act — your data stays in-country
99.9% uptime SLA and free DDoS protection on every service

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No credit card required · Local billing in KES, TZS & NGN

99.9%

Uptime SLA on every service

KES

Priced, billed and invoiced in KES

~5 ms

Typical round trip within Nairobi

Countries, one account and one bill

Running production workloads for teams in Kenya. Customer references available under NDA.

Coming soon

Bulk SMS, WhatsApp, voice and USSD for your apps.

Learn more

Regions

Nairobi is home. The other two are there when you need them.

ke-1a is in Nairobi, and for a Kenyan business that is most of the argument. Your customers arrive on Safaricom, on Faiba, on Zuku, on Poa — 2.65 million fixed subscriptions and 84.1 million active SIMs, nearly all of them inside the country. Lineserve peers at KIXP, the neutral exchange TESPOK runs across four Nairobi facilities, so traffic between your instance and another of its 136 networks is handed over a few kilometres away. A round trip that starts and finishes inside the metro is typically around 2 ms.

That matters because of where Kenya's bandwidth comes ashore. Every international subsea cable lands at Mombasa — SEACOM, EASSy, TEAMS, PEACE, DARE1 and LION2 — and the capacity is hauled roughly 480 km inland before it reaches a Nairobi rack. Anything leaving the country still makes that trip. Domestic traffic takes the other route entirely, exchanged in Nairobi between networks in the same city, and choosing ke-1a decides which of those two journeys your checkout depends on.

Dar es Salaam and Lagos sit on the same account, the same API and the same shilling invoice. Open tz-1a when you start selling into Tanzania and want the data held there under Tanzanian law, or ng-1a when Lagos becomes a market rather than a pin on a map. They are also where a copy goes when you want one outside Kenya — a standby database, a backup bucket — which makes disaster recovery a configuration change instead of a second supplier.

Live

Kenya

Nairobi

~2 ms

typical, within metro · Data stays in Kenya

Live

Tanzania

Dar es Salaam

~6 ms

typical, within metro · Data stays in Tanzania

Live

Nigeria

Lagos

~4 ms

typical, within metro · Data stays in Nigeria

Expansion zonesUganda · ug-1aSouth Africa · za-1aGhana · gh-1a

Why Lineserve

The advantages that only come from being here

A global cloud sells Kenya 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 KES

Pay by M-Pesa and other mobile money, bank transfer, or card. Priced and invoiced in KES, with no forex conversion on your side.

Infrastructure in your metro

Your server runs in Nairobi, not an ocean away. Requests from your users reach it without leaving the country.

Support in your timezone

Reach a real engineer on +254 119 039 063, working the hours you work — not a ticket in a queue several timezones away.

Your data stays in-country

Keep regulated and sensitive data in Kenya, giving you data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act.

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 run production systems here — M-Pesa integration endpoints taking Safaricom callbacks, SACCO core banking and member portals, WooCommerce and Magento storefronts, and newsroom traffic through election and results days.

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.

Read the docs

terminal

# 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

Kenya's bandwidth lands at the coast. Your users are not at the coast.

Kenya's international capacity does not arrive in Nairobi. It comes ashore at Mombasa, where six subsea systems land: SEACOM at 10,500 Gbps of lit capacity, EASSy at 6,500, TEAMS at 4,063, PEACE at 3,738, DARE1 at 2,210 and LION2 at 1,119. From the coast it is hauled roughly 480 km inland over terrestrial fibre before it reaches a Nairobi rack. That is the shape of Kenyan network geography: the bandwidth is at the coast, the customers are everywhere else, and where inside the country a server sits decides how much of that path a page load has to touch.

Nairobi is where Kenyan networks meet each other. KIXP, the neutral exchange TESPOK has run in its current form since February 2002, carries 136 peer networks over 151 connections and 2.9 Tbps of combined capacity across four Nairobi facilities, with 108 of those networks peering openly and IPv6 adoption at 84%. Lineserve peers at KIXP. Traffic between ke-1a and another network present there is exchanged inside the city — a few kilometres of fibre rather than a trip to Europe and back.

Your visitors arrive over names a Nairobi buyer already knows. In the quarter to March 2026 the Authority counted 2,656,653 fixed subscriptions — Safaricom on 941,501, Jamii Telecommunications, Faiba, on 517,270, Wananchi's Zuku on 276,607 and Poa Internet on 256,517 — alongside 84,090,298 active SIMs at 157.7% penetration, 52,852,505 of them on 3G, 4G or 5G.

Whichever of those a customer is on, they are inside Kenya — and so is ke-1a. Someone in Kilimani taps your checkout on a Safaricom handset. The request is handed between networks a few kilometres away. Your server answers from the same city, and a round trip that stays inside Nairobi is typically single-digit milliseconds. The 480 km run to Mombasa and the ocean beyond it never enter the transaction at all.

84.1M

Active SIMs in Kenya (CA, Q1 2026)

136

Networks peering at KIXP, Nairobi (PeeringDB)

2.9 Tbps

Combined KIXP capacity, four Nairobi facilities

480 km

Mombasa cable landings to Nairobi

Your visitor is on a handset

Kenya carries 84.1 million active SIMs against 2.65 million fixed lines, and 50,175,502 of the devices attached to those networks are smartphones — 63.7% of everything connected. Mobile broadband consumption ran to 800,027,716 GB in a single quarter, averaging 15.1 GB per subscription. The person waiting on your page is on a mid-range Android, on mobile data, somewhere between Westlands and Nakuru. Page weight, round trips and where the origin sits are the three levers you control, and only one of them takes an afternoon.

Domestic and international are two different journeys

The Communications Authority puts Kenya's lit international capacity at 28,130 Gbps with 17,759 Gbps in use — all of it reached through Mombasa and the sea beyond. Domestic traffic takes the other route entirely: exchanged in Nairobi, between networks a few kilometres apart. Hosting in ke-1a is a decision about the second journey, and for most Kenyan businesses the second journey is nearly all of it.

Payments

The wallet you already pay everything else with

Mobile money in Kenya is not an alternative to the card. It is the default, and the card is the alternative. The Communications Authority counts 53,368,939 active mobile money subscriptions — a penetration rate of 100.1% — served by 602,470 registered agents, with M-Pesa holding 89.1% of the market. A Kenyan business that has never held a dollar card has still paid for everything it used this month. So the order below is the order Kenyan commerce runs in, and you are billed in KES throughout: nothing converts, nothing lands on your statement as a foreign transaction, and your bank adds no foreign-transaction fee.

M-Pesa first

M-Pesa and other mobile money, in shillings, for the monthly instance and the ordinary renewal. Kenyan VAT at 16% is calculated and shown separately at checkout, so the tax sits on its own line rather than hiding inside the rate.

Bank transfer second

The rail for anything with a signature behind it. A LineServe Core 1 at KES 46,350 a month plus its one-time KES 14,850 setup fee, or a year taken up front at ten months for twelve, is a treasury payment rather than a wallet payment — and a transfer carries that size without a conversation about limits.

Card third

Visa and Mastercard work, charged in shillings, and for some finance teams a card on file beats a payment instruction every thirty days. It is simply not the assumption this market is built on, which is why it sits third rather than first.

A shilling price list, not a converted one

The KES figures here are Kenya's own price list, set per currency rather than converted from a dollar rate when the page loads. KES 8,330 is KES 8,330 in January and in November — which is the one property a twelve-month infrastructure budget actually depends on.

Mobile money runs around the clock and bank transfers clear in banking hours, so if the timing of a purchase matters, plan around the rail rather than the hour. Annual billing is ten months for twelve on eligible plans.

Data residency

Your data stays in Nairobi, under the law that already applies to you

Kenya's Data Protection Act, No. 24 of 2019 is administered by the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner, and the first thing worth knowing is that hosting abroad does not put you outside it. Section 4(b) applies the Act to a controller or processor who is not established or ordinarily resident in Kenya but processes the personal data of people located in Kenya. Moving the server to Frankfurt moves the data. The obligation stays exactly where it was.

The second is that sending personal data out of the country is conditional rather than forbidden. Section 48 permits it where appropriate safeguards have been demonstrated to the Data Commissioner, or where the transfer is necessary for contract performance or another listed ground; section 49 is stricter for sensitive personal data, requiring the data subject's consent as well. Keep your Kenyan customers' records in ke-1a and none of that has anything to bite on: no transfer to justify, no safeguards to demonstrate, no consent to gather before a record can cross a border. It never crosses one.

What that buys you week to week is a shorter security review and a one-word answer to the question every procurement form asks. Where is the customer data held? Nairobi — the same city as the people it describes, and within reach of the same regulator.

Regulation 26 names six purposes, and only six

Section 50 lets the Cabinet Secretary require certain processing to run through a server or data centre located in Kenya, and Regulation 26 of the Data Protection (General) Regulations, 2021 exercises that power for six named purposes: civil registration and legal identity; the conduct of elections; overseeing systems for administering public finances; running a protected computer system under the Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act, 2018; early childhood and basic education; and primary or secondary health care. For those, the requirement is processing in Kenya or at least one serving copy held in a Kenyan data centre. ke-1a is in Nairobi. Outside those six categories it is your choice, and anyone telling a Kenyan business otherwise is overstating a narrow rule.

In a restricted sector, size is no defence

Registration with the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner runs from KES 4,000 for micro and small entities to KES 16,000 for medium and KES 40,000 for large. The exemption for entities under KES 5 million turnover with fewer than ten employees is switched off in financial services, telecommunications, health, education, insurance, betting, public bodies and religious organisations — a four-person digital lender registers on the same footing as a bank. That obligation follows from what you process, not from where you host.

What Lineserve supplies here is location: data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act, with your data held in Nairobi and moved out of Kenya only when you move it. Registration, notices and the rest of the controller's job stay with you.

Tax & invoicing

16% VAT, on an invoice issued by a Kenyan company

Kenya's standard VAT rate is 16%, and the Kenya Revenue Authority treats digital marketplace supplies as taxable under section 5(2)(b) of the VAT Act. Its published list of taxable digital services names cloud backup, email hosting and software subscriptions, so hosting is inside the net whoever sells it to you. Prices on this site exclude VAT and the 16% is calculated and shown separately at checkout, which keeps the figure in your budget line the infrastructure figure and puts the tax where your accountant looks for it.

The rate is the easy half. What decides whether your finance team can do anything with the bill is who issued it, and that is where a Kenyan supplier and an overseas one part company. Lineserve Limited is registered for VAT in Kenya, so a Kenyan buyer receives a Kenyan tax invoice with the 16% shown on it rather than a foreign receipt somebody has to defend in April. That is the difference between an expense you claim and an expense you explain, and it is worth comparing providers on.

What a Kenyan tax invoice carries

The seller's KRA PIN and registered name; a unique invoice number with the date; the buyer's KRA PIN on a business-to-business sale; the description, quantity, unit price and taxable value of what was bought; and the VAT charged, shown separately from the net. Input VAT and the expense are only safe on audit against a document carrying those. In Kenya the invoice is a purchasing criterion, not an administrative afterthought.

The deadline that decides the period

VAT falls due by the 20th of the month following the earlier of invoice, performance or payment, filed on a VAT3 return through iTax. Buy on the 28th and the claim lands in a different month from a purchase on the 2nd — worth knowing when a quarter-end approval is already moving.

Send [email protected] your KRA PIN, your registered name as KRA holds it and any LPO reference before you order, and your invoicing requirements are set up with the account rather than corrected after the first billing run.

Who runs here

The Kenyan workloads that belong in Nairobi

Six shapes of buyer recur in this market. Each of them is buying for a reason that only makes sense inside the country.

Digital lenders and fintech

The Central Bank has licensed digital credit providers under its 2022 regulations and processed well over 800 applications since, which makes this the most closely watched segment in Kenyan hosting. The infrastructure has a recognisable shape: mobile-money integration endpoints that must accept Safaricom callbacks without a cold start, credit-scoring jobs over alternative data, KYC document stores, loan-book databases and USSD gateway backends. The callbacks originate in Kenya and so does the regulator. A production pair usually starts around KES 8,330 with the database on its own instance.

SACCOs and microfinance

Deposit-taking SACCOs are a distinctly Kenyan institution, sitting under SASRA and running real core banking: member portals, USSD and mobile channels, mobile-money reconciliation, and a core database nobody wants sharing a disk. Month-end closes and dividend runs are batch jobs that want a whole machine for a few days and nothing for the rest of the month — which is either a dedicated server, or a cloud server you resize up and hand back.

ISPs, WISPs and managed service providers

Behind Safaricom and Faiba, the Authority's fixed-ISP table has a long tail — Ahadi Wireless, Vilcom, Mawingu, and a further 3.5% spread across dozens of regional operators. RADIUS and AAA, billing and provisioning stacks, recursive resolvers, NetFlow collectors, Zabbix and LibreNMS, speedtest endpoints and looking glasses. None of it means anything outside the country it serves: a monitoring node in Frankfurt tells you about Frankfurt. Several small instances from KES 2,195 each, on private networking.

Newsrooms and publishers

Nairobi's media sector is unusually large for the size of the market, and its traffic is event-shaped rather than curve-shaped: a general election every five years in August, budget day in June, national exam results. The number that decides the architecture is the peak on one Tuesday, not the monthly average. Live-blog infrastructure and WordPress behind a cache belong on something you take from 4 vCPU to 32 on Monday and back down on Thursday.

Agencies, resellers and online retail

KENIC counts roughly 123,150 registered .ke domains across 533 accredited registrars, and Nairobi's agency and freelance scene is where most of them end up pointed. One buyer, many client sites: multi-tenant hosting, staging environments, control-panel installs and Git-based deploys. Beside them sits a long tail of retail that moved from social selling onto WooCommerce, where a mobile-money callback endpoint has to be awake when the operator calls it.

NGOs, education and health platforms

Nairobi holds a very large concentration of NGO and UN regional offices, and their systems are data-heavy in the way that makes location a board question: DHIS2 deployments, KoboToolbox and ODK form servers taking submissions from enumerators on mobile data, M&E dashboards, county revenue systems, school management and clinic software. This is where Regulation 26 stops being abstract — basic education, primary and secondary health care and public finance administration are three of its six named purposes.

Cloud servers from KES 1,389/month, Linux VPS from KES 2,195, Windows VPS from KES 3,195 with the licence included, dedicated LineServe Core hardware from KES 46,350, S3-compatible object storage, and colocation in Nairobi quoted per footprint — on one account, one API and one invoice in shillings.

Migrating

Moving from where you are now

From a provider outside Kenya

The engineering is an ordinary afternoon: build the instance, rsync, dump and restore the database, dual-run for a day, move the DNS. The commercial half is what pays for it. Today the list price is only the first number — a dollar bill charged to a Kenyan card picks up the issuer's spread and, at most Kenyan banks, a foreign-transaction fee, so the figure approved in January is not the figure that clears in September. Afterwards it is a shilling number you can hold somebody to for twelve months, a Kenyan tax invoice at the end of each of them, and +254 119 039 063 to ring. The server moves from a European rack to a Nairobi one, which is a straightforward improvement for every user you have in Kenya.

From another Kenyan host

Be honest about what is not the reason. Nairobi hosting, a Kenyan IP and M-Pesa billing are table stakes here; every local provider advertises all three and they are right to. The reason to move is the layer underneath. Infrastructure primitives instead of a resold control panel: an API and a CLI, snapshots and scheduled backups, private networking, and the ability to resize a running machine up to 32 vCPU and 64 GB. A published 99.9% uptime SLA that pays service credits when it is missed. Object storage and dedicated hardware on the same account as the VPS fleet. And two further regions, in Dar es Salaam and Lagos, the day you need a copy of something outside Kenya.

Four questions are worth putting to any provider, this one included. Which building is the machine in, and in which city? Is domestic traffic exchanged inside Kenya, or does it take a trip abroad and back? What does the uptime SLA pay out when it is missed, and who claims it? And does the invoice work for your VAT return? A monthly price is easy to compare. Those four are what the price is for.

FAQ

Questions, answered

In Nairobi. The region code is ke-1a and it is live today. Dar es Salaam (tz-1a) and Lagos (ng-1a) sit on the same account and the same API when you want a second region.

The Kenyan contracting entity is Lineserve Limited, registered for VAT in Kenya, with an office on Utalii Lane in the Nairobi CBD and a Kenyan line on +254 119 039 063. So a Kenyan buyer is invoiced by a Kenyan company rather than a foreign one.

Yes. Kenyan customers pay in Kenya Shillings using M-Pesa and other mobile money, by bank transfer, or by card. No foreign card and no forex conversion is required.

KES. Prices can be viewed in USD, KES, TZS or NGN, but as a Kenyan customer you settle in shillings — with no conversion and no foreign-transaction fee from your bank.

No. Displayed prices exclude VAT. Kenya's standard rate on this class of service is 16%, and it is calculated and shown separately at checkout.

Lineserve Limited is registered for VAT in Kenya, so what you receive is a Kenyan tax invoice showing the 16% separately rather than a foreign receipt. Send [email protected] your KRA PIN and registered name before you order, so the invoicing requirements are set up with the account.

Yes. Data you put in ke-1a is held in Nairobi and is not moved out of the country without your instruction. That is data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act — a statement about where the disk is, not a certification.

No. Compliance belongs to you as the controller whichever country the server sits in. What Nairobi removes is the cross-border transfer question in sections 48 and 49 for the data that stays here, and it makes the answer to "where is our customer data?" the name of a city rather than a paragraph.

Generally, no. Regulation 26 of the Data Protection (General) Regulations, 2021 requires in-country processing, or at least one serving copy in a Kenyan data centre, for six named purposes — civil registration and identity, elections, public finance systems, protected computer systems, basic education, and primary or secondary health care. Outside those categories it is your choice.

Registration is your obligation as a controller or processor and follows from what you process, not from where you host. Fees run KES 4,000 to KES 40,000 by size, and entities in financial services, telecommunications, health, education, insurance, betting, public bodies and religious organisations register regardless of size.

Yes. KIXP is the neutral exchange TESPOK operates across four Nairobi facilities, with 136 peer networks, 151 connections and 2.9 Tbps of combined capacity on PeeringDB. Lineserve peers there, so traffic between ke-1a and another network present at KIXP is exchanged inside Nairobi.

Faster than the same site hosted in Europe, because the request never leaves the country. Their network hands the traffic over inside Nairobi and your server answers from the same city — typically single-digit milliseconds, with no 480 km haul to Mombasa and no subsea leg in the middle of a page load.

There is no bandwidth line on the bill. Cloud servers and VPS plans include a 1 Gbps port with unlimited local traffic, and on object storage you pay for what you store — transfer in, transfer out and API requests are not metered.

Yes. Windows Server 2019, 2022 and 2025 Standard are available, licensed and activated. A Windows VPS starts at KES 3,195 a month with the licence included; on a cloud server the licence is billed per vCPU on a minimum of four cores, from KES 800 a month.

Yes — tz-1a in Dar es Salaam and ng-1a in Lagos run on the same account and API, which makes standby and disaster recovery a configuration rather than a second supplier. Be deliberate with personal data: a copy in another country is a cross-border transfer under sections 48 and 49. Application images and build artefacts raise no such question.

Yes. A domain registered with any KENIC-accredited registrar points at a Lineserve instance like any other — set the A and AAAA records to your server and you are live.

Customer references are available under NDA. Ask [email protected] or +254 119 039 063 and the team will arrange one against the sector and workload you are buying for.

Yes — +254 119 039 063, alongside [email protected] and the ticket system. Kenya is on East Africa Time year-round with no daylight saving, so business hours mean the same thing every month of the year.

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

A Nairobi number, and East Africa Time all year

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.

Kenya

+254 119 039 063

Sales

[email protected]

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.

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No credit card required · 99.9% uptime SLA · Local billing in KES, TZS & NGN