Cloud Servers — hosted in Nairobi (ke-1a)
Cloud Servers in Kenya
Compute in Nairobi, priced in shillings, sized by the vCPU.
Most cloud servers sold in Kenya run somewhere else. The console is in a browser, the region is in Cape Town or Frankfurt, and the only Kenyan thing about the deployment is the person paying for it. ke-1a is in Nairobi. You build the machine resource by resource — vCPU, RAM, SSD, IPv4 as you need it and a free /64 of IPv6 — and it boots in under 60 seconds, billed in KES.
1 vCPU · 1 GB RAM · 20 GB SSD · IPv4 included — build exactly the server you need.
- Nairobi region ke-1a — Kenyan users are not crossing an ocean to reach you
- Priced per vCPU, per GB of RAM and per GB of SSD
- Pay in KES with M-Pesa and other mobile money, bank transfer, or card
- Data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act — your data stays in-country
- Deploy in under 60 seconds, resize on demand, 99.9% uptime SLA
No credit card required · Local billing in KES, TZS & NGN
Pricing calculator
Build exactly the server you need
No fixed plans — pay per vCPU, per GB of RAM and per GB of SSD. Linux images are free; Windows Server adds a license fee. In your currency, no forex.
Operating system
Minimum 20 GB for Linux images.
Your server
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos
- Compute2 vCPU · 4 GB RAM
- Storage40 GB Universal SSD
- Public IPv41 address
- ImageLinux (free)
Unit rates
| Resource | Unit | Price /mo |
|---|---|---|
| vCPU | per vCPU | KES 433 |
| RAM | per GB | KES 306 |
| Storage — Universal SSD | per GB | KES 25 |
| Public IPv4 | per address | KES 150 |
| Windows Server 2019 Standard | per server | From KES 800 |
| Windows Server 2022 Standard | per server | From KES 1,000 |
| Windows Server 2025 Standard | per server | From KES 1,200 |
| Bandwidth | 1 Gbps port, unlimited local traffic | Free |
| IPv6 (/64) | per server | Free |
| Linux images | Ubuntu, Debian, Rocky, AlmaLinux | Free |
Prices exclude VAT and any applicable taxes. Annual billing gives you two months free. Local currency figures are indicative and settled at checkout.
Network
The nearest big cloud region is not in Kenya
No hyperscaler runs a full cloud region in Kenya. Amazon's African region is in Cape Town, and the other large providers serve Kenyan customers from South Africa or from Europe. Most cloud servers sold in this market therefore run somewhere else: the console is in a browser, the region is on another continent, and the only Kenyan thing about the deployment is the person paying for it. ke-1a is in Nairobi.
That gap is easy to misread, because the large providers are present in Nairobi in one specific sense. Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, Meta and SpaceX are among the 136 networks that peer at KIXP, the Kenya Internet Exchange Point operated by TESPOK. Their content is close to Kenyan users. Their compute regions are not in Kenya. Deploy an application to one of those clouds and the application still executes abroad, even though the cache in front of it sits down the road.
Behind Nairobi sits the other half of Kenyan network geography. Every Kenyan international subsea cable lands at Mombasa — TEAMS, SEACOM, EASSy, LION2, DARE1 and PEACE — and capacity is backhauled roughly 480 km inland. The Communications Authority reported 28,130 Gbps of lit international capacity for January–March 2026, of which 17,759 Gbps was in use. Kenya is not short of international capacity. What it is short of is compute at the end of it.
28,130 Gbps
Lit international capacity (CA, Q1 2026)
17,759 Gbps
Of that, capacity in use (CA, Q1 2026)
136
Networks peering at KIXP, Nairobi (PeeringDB)
480 km
Mombasa landing to Nairobi backhaul
What peering does, stated precisely
Here is precisely what peering buys you: when two networks are both present at KIXP, the traffic between them is exchanged inside Nairobi instead of being hauled to Europe and back, which takes an intercontinental round trip out of the path entirely. The benefit lands for every network present at the exchange — and 136 of them are, over 151 connections and 2.9 Tbps of combined capacity.
Who your Kenyan users connect from
On fixed lines, the Communications Authority's January–March 2026 table puts Safaricom at 941,501 subscriptions (35.4%), Faiba — Jamii Telecom — at 517,270 (19.5%), Zuku at 276,607 and Poa Internet at 256,517, followed by Ahadi Wireless, Vilcom, Mawingu and Liquid. On mobile, Safaricom holds 68.9% of subscriptions and 62.7% of mobile broadband, with Airtel second. Your users are on those networks, inside Kenya, and so is ke-1a. When one of them opens your application, the traffic stays on Kenyan infrastructure the whole way — handset to base station to KIXP to your hypervisor, and back the same route.
Payments
Pay for cloud the way Kenya pays for everything else
Kenya is not a card market with mobile money attached. It is the other way round. The Communications Authority counted 53,368,939 active mobile money subscriptions in January–March 2026 — a penetration rate of 100.1% — served by 602,470 registered agents, with M-Pesa holding 89.1% of the market. A Kenyan finance manager does not think of M-Pesa as an alternative payment method; the card is the alternative. So the order here is the order in real life, and the bill is in KES: no dollar conversion, no international card, no foreign-transaction fee.
M-Pesa first
Build the server in the configurator, see the KES total before you commit, and settle it with M-Pesa or other mobile money in shillings.
Bank transfer second
Where finance wants one approval instead of twelve, or the monthly commitment is large enough to run into a mobile-money ceiling.
Card third
Visa and Mastercard are accepted for the teams that prefer them. They are the option, not the assumption.
The platform
A full cloud, not just a server
Every Cloud Server sits on a platform built to grow with you — automate it, resize it, connect it, and protect it, all from one place.
Deploy in 60 seconds
Provision a production-ready instance in under a minute, from console or API.
Resize on demand
Scale vCPU, RAM, and storage up as you grow, with minimal downtime.
NVMe SSD storage
Enterprise NVMe throughout for fast boot, quick builds, and low-latency databases.
Snapshots & backups
Capture point-in-time snapshots and schedule automated backups in a click.
Private networking
Isolated internal networks to connect your instances securely, region by region.
Free DDoS protection
Always-on network-layer mitigation included on every instance at no extra cost.
Full API & CLI
Manage everything as code — create, resize, snapshot, and destroy through a clean API.
IPv4 & IPv6
A dedicated IPv4 address plus native IPv6 on every instance.
Console access
Reach your server directly through a browser console when SSH or RDP isn't enough.
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.
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 what you're building
Web apps & APIs
Host Node, Python, Go, PHP, or .NET behind a load balancer with room to scale.
Databases
Run PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, or Redis on fast NVMe with the memory they need.
Containers & CI
A clean host for Docker, Compose, and build runners, close to your team and users.
Business systems
ERPs, internal tools, and line-of-business apps on Linux or Windows, run reliably.
How it works
Live in three steps
Choose region, OS & size
Pick a region, Linux or Windows, and the instance that fits your workload.
Deploy in under 60 seconds
We provision your server and run your setup — no manual first-run steps.
Connect & scale
Log in over SSH or RDP, then resize or snapshot anytime from the console or API.
Uptime SLA
99.9%
- DDoS filtering is included, not an upsell
- Service credits applied automatically when we miss the SLA
- Measured monthly, per region, on network and power availability
Support
A Nairobi number, and East Africa Time all year
Kenya has its own line: +254 119 039 063. Alongside it are [email protected] and the ticket system, and Lineserve Limited keeps an office on Utalii Lane, View Park Towers, in the Nairobi CBD. A supplier with a street address in your own city is a different kind of counterparty from a web form and a billing address in another hemisphere.
Kenya runs on East Africa Time, UTC+3, and has never observed daylight saving. That reads like trivia until you are the one holding the phone. Business hours here mean the same thing in January and in July; nothing slides by an hour twice a year because another country changed its clocks. When your checkout starts throwing 502s at 09:20 on a Tuesday, it is 09:20 for whoever picks up — an ordinary working morning in the same city, rather than the small hours of somebody's Monday night, eight time zones west.
The other half of local support is vocabulary, not hours. The person you reach knows what a Safaricom callback is, what KIXP has to do with the trace you are staring at, and why your finance team wants a KRA PIN on the invoice. None of that has to be explained before the actual problem can be. Buy from somewhere that has never sold into Kenya and the first twenty minutes of every serious ticket go on describing the country.
Kenya
+254 119 039 063
Sales
Why Lineserve
Decided on what actually matters here
Tax & invoicing
What Kenyan VAT means for a cloud bill
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. Hosting is not a grey area inside that: KRA's published list of taxable digital services names cloud backup, email hosting and software subscriptions explicitly. VAT falls due by the 20th of the month following the earlier of invoice, performance or payment, and is filed on a VAT3 return through iTax.
What a Kenyan business is actually asking is narrower than any of that — can I claim it? For a business-to-business purchase the answer turns on the document. Input VAT and the expense are only safe on audit against a valid tax invoice carrying the seller's KRA PIN and registered name, a unique invoice number, the buyer's own KRA PIN, the item description and taxable value, the VAT charged as its own line, and the control number and QR code returned when the invoice is transmitted.
One thing is specific to buying compute by the resource: a bill built from vCPU, RAM and storage moves when you resize, so finance sees a different figure in different months. Annual billing is the usual answer to that — pay for ten months and get twelve, on one approval rather than twelve.
Bring your invoicing requirements to [email protected] before you order, so the document arrives in the form your accountant needs rather than after a month of reconciliation.
Data residency
Kenya's Data Protection Act, and where the servers are
Kenya's law is the Data Protection Act, No. 24 of 2019, and the regulator is the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner. Start with the part most buyers get wrong: the Act reaches you wherever you host. Section 4 applies it both to a controller or processor established or ordinarily resident in Kenya and to one not established or ordinarily resident here but processing personal data of data subjects located in Kenya. Moving a workload to Frankfurt does not move it out of the Act's reach. It moves the data.
Sending data abroad is not banned either. It is conditioned. Section 48 permits transfer out of Kenya where the Data Commissioner has been given proof of appropriate safeguards, or where the transfer is necessary for contract performance, public interest, legal claims, vital interests or compelling legitimate interests. Section 49(1) is stricter for sensitive personal data, requiring both the data subject's consent and confirmation of appropriate safeguards, and section 49(3) lets the Commissioner prohibit, suspend or condition a transfer. For the data that stays in Nairobi, none of that analysis arises. There is no transfer, so there is nothing to prove to the Commissioner, no consent to gather, and nothing for section 49(3) to suspend on a Friday afternoon.
Regulation 26, and how narrow it actually is
Section 50 lets the Cabinet Secretary prescribe processing that may only be done through a server or data centre in Kenya, and that power has been used. Regulation 26 of the Data Protection (General) Regulations, 2021 requires a controller or processor handling personal data for a listed strategic-interest purpose either to process it through a server and data centre located in Kenya, or to store at least one serving copy in a data centre located in Kenya. The listed purposes are: civil registration and legal identity management; the conduct of elections; overseeing any system for administering public finances by a state organ; running a system designated a protected computer system under the Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act, 2018; early childhood and basic education under the Basic Education Act, 2013; and primary or secondary health care. That is the whole list. Build in one of those areas and ke-1a settles the question outright. Build outside them — as most Kenyan businesses do — and where your data sits becomes a commercial decision, which Nairobi wins on speed, currency and the invoice rather than on statute.
The multi-region decision this changes
The same account and the same API reach tz-1a in Dar es Salaam and ng-1a in Lagos, which is the usual way to hold a standby copy of something. Worth knowing before you script it: replicating personal data to either of them is a transfer out of Kenya, and sections 48 and 49 apply to it. Keep the primary in Nairobi and decide the replica deliberately rather than by default.
Location is the part a host controls
Lineserve provides data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act: your data is held in Nairobi and is not moved out of Kenya without your instruction. That answers the first question on every data-protection questionnaire and every enterprise security review — where is it held? In Nairobi, in the same country as the people it describes, under the Act your own counsel already reads. The registration and the compliance programme stay where they belong, with you as the controller.
Who runs here
What Kenyan teams deploy into ke-1a
Digital lenders and payments teams
The Central Bank licenses digital credit providers under its 2022 regulations, and the workloads are specific: Daraja integration endpoints that have to accept Safaricom callbacks without a cold start, credit-scoring batch jobs over alternative data, KYC document stores, loan-book databases and USSD gateway backends. Two things pull these into Nairobi rather than a European region — the callbacks originate in Kenya, and digital credit providers are a restricted sector for ODPC registration, so they register regardless of size.
SACCOs
Deposit-taking savings and credit cooperatives, regulated by SASRA, have a distinctly lumpy compute profile: core banking that must be up in business hours, a member self-service portal, Paybill reconciliation, and month-end and dividend runs that need several times the everyday CPU for a few days. Per-resource compute fits that shape — take the vCPU for the dividend run, give it back afterwards.
Newsrooms
Nairobi supports an unusually large media sector for the size of the market, and its traffic is not steady: election nights, budget day in June, national exam results, each a hard single-day peak on an otherwise ordinary week. Cloud servers earn their keep on exactly that curve — add vCPU and RAM before the event, hold through the spike, drop back after.
ISPs and WISPs
Behind the big four, the Communications Authority's fixed-ISP table has a long tail of regional operators. Their infrastructure has to be in-country to be useful at all: RADIUS and AAA, Splynx-style billing and provisioning, recursive DNS resolvers, NetFlow collectors, Zabbix or LibreNMS polling, speedtest endpoints and looking glasses. A monitoring node in Frankfurt tells you about Frankfurt.
Health, education and county programmes
Nairobi holds a dense layer of NGO country offices, donor programmes and county-government IT: DHIS2 health information deployments, KoboToolbox and ODK form servers, monitoring-and-evaluation dashboards, county revenue systems. This is where Regulation 26 bites hardest — basic education, primary and secondary health care, and public finance systems are three of its six named categories.
Migrating
Moving a workload into Nairobi
From an overseas provider
The technical part is usually the easy part — same Linux, same Docker, same Postgres dump. What changes is everything around it. The bill arrives in KES, so it stops moving with the exchange rate between the day you deployed and the day finance pays. You settle it with M-Pesa, a transfer or a card instead of needing a card that works internationally. Support answers inside EAT hours. And your Kenyan users stop crossing an ocean to load a page. Nairobi earns its place when the users are Kenyan; where a slice of your traffic sits elsewhere, keep that slice where it is and run the Kenyan half here — one account and one API reach all three regions.
From another Kenyan host
A Nairobi data centre, a Kenyan IP and M-Pesa billing are table stakes in this market — every local provider advertises them, and they are right to. The reason to move is what sits underneath: IaaS primitives rather than resold control panels, so you get an API, a CLI, snapshots, private networking and the ability to resize vCPU, RAM and storage independently on a running machine; object storage and dedicated servers in the same account and on the same invoice; and two further regions in Dar es Salaam and Lagos when you need a copy of something outside Nairobi.
Four questions separate providers in this market, and they are worth asking us as well as them: which exchange points and networks are you actually adjacent to and under which ASN, what is the measured latency from your network to Safaricom and Faiba, what does the SLA pay out when it is missed, and what appears on the invoice. Put those four to us and to whoever else you are considering, get the answers in writing, and read them side by side before you sign anything.
FAQ
Questions, answered
None — they're the same product. "Cloud Server" is our name for the virtual machine; the Linux VPS and Windows VPS pages are just that server viewed by operating system. Pick whichever entry point suits you.
Yes. Choose your operating system at deploy time. Linux images (Ubuntu, Debian, Rocky, AlmaLinux) are free; Windows Server adds a license fee from $8/month that scales with the size of your server — the calculator shows the exact figure for your configuration.
Your server is the sum of its parts: $4.33 per vCPU, $3.06 per GB of RAM, $0.25 per GB of SSD storage, and $1.50 per public IPv4, each per month. IPv6 is free. There are no fixed plans — change any dial independently.
Yes. Scale vCPU, RAM, and storage up as you grow, with minimal downtime — every resource moves independently, so you never pay for a bundle you don't need.
Under 60 seconds. Your instance provisions and runs any setup you provide, so it's ready to use — not just powered on.
Yes. Every action — create, resize, snapshot, destroy — is available through a clean API and command-line tool, so you can manage infrastructure as code.
Every instance supports on-demand snapshots and scheduled automated backups. Snapshot storage is billed per GB beyond your included allowance.
Yes. Our team assists with moving existing workloads into Lineserve at no extra charge. Reach out to support to plan the move.
In ke-1a, our Nairobi region. Your instance and its storage stay there unless you deploy to another region yourself.
No hyperscaler operates a full cloud region in Kenya today. The nearest Amazon region is in Cape Town, and the other large providers serve Kenyan customers from South Africa or Europe. That is the gap ke-1a exists to fill.
Yes. Lineserve peers at KIXP, so traffic between ke-1a and another network present there is exchanged inside Nairobi rather than hauled to Europe and back. KIXP has run in its current form since February 2002 and now carries 136 peer networks over 151 connections and 2.9 Tbps of combined capacity across four Nairobi facilities — it is where the Kenyan internet meets itself.
The shortest path this market offers, because the path is structural rather than incidental. A request from a Safaricom or Faiba subscriber to ke-1a is exchanged at KIXP and answered in Nairobi — two points in one city. The same request to a European region climbs 480 km to the Mombasa landings, crosses a subsea cable to another continent, and repeats the whole journey coming back.
Because that is where the cables land. TEAMS, SEACOM, EASSy, LION2, DARE1 and PEACE all come ashore at Mombasa, and capacity is backhauled roughly 480 km inland to Nairobi.
Yes. Kenyan customers pay in KES with M-Pesa and other mobile money, by bank transfer, or by card. No foreign card and no forex conversion is required.
Yes. Data in ke-1a is held in Nairobi and is not moved out of Kenya without your instruction. That gives you data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act.
No — compliance under the Data Protection Act is your obligation as controller, and it stays yours in any country. What hosting in Kenya changes is the cross-border transfer question: for the data that stays here, sections 48 and 49 have nothing to apply to, so that entire chapter of the analysis closes.
Regulation 26 requires processing through a server and data centre located in Kenya, or at least one serving copy stored in a Kenyan data centre, for six named purposes — civil registration and identity, elections, public finance systems, designated protected computer systems, basic education, and primary or secondary health care. ke-1a is a data centre located in Kenya. Confirm the specifics against your own obligations with your counsel.
Yes — tz-1a in Dar es Salaam and ng-1a in Lagos run on the same account and the same API. Note that moving personal data out of Kenya engages sections 48 and 49 of the Data Protection Act, so make that a deliberate decision rather than a default.
vCPU, RAM and storage each move independently with minimal downtime, so a SACCO can take extra cores for a dividend run and give them back, and a news site can scale for election night without changing plan. Windows Server 2019, 2022 and 2025 Standard are available, licensed per vCPU on a minimum of four cores and billed in KES. Linux images are free.
Annual billing is ten months for twelve — one payment, one approval. Our team assists with migrating existing workloads in at no extra charge.
Deploy your first Cloud Server in under 60 seconds
Linux or Windows, running close to your users. Pay in local currency, with no card required to start.
No credit card required · 99.9% uptime SLA · Local billing in KES, TZS & NGN