Colocation — Nairobi, ke-1a
Colocation in Kenya — your hardware, racked in Nairobi
Colocation in carrier-neutral, Tier III data centres — close to home.
Colocation in Kenya is for the team that owns its hardware and wants it out of the office. Ship the boxes to Nairobi, and our engineers receive, rack, cable and power them. You keep the asset on your balance sheet, keep root on your own machines, and keep the data physically in Kenya. Billing is in KES, so finance is not reconciling a dollar invoice against a shilling budget every month.
- Your hardware, your spec, racked in Nairobi (ke-1a)
- Redundant A+B power with a metered allowance per footprint
- Data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act — your data stays in-country
- Remote hands for reboots, recabling and installs
- Billed in KES, with a Kenyan phone number to call — +254 119 039 063
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 KES 64,500 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
Nairobi is where Kenyan networks meet each other
Kenya's local interconnection story is unusually good for a market this size, and it is the reason a rack in Nairobi behaves differently from a rack in Frankfurt. KIXP, the Kenya Internet Exchange Point, is a neutral non-profit exchange operated by TESPOK. PeeringDB records 136 peer networks across 151 connections and 2.9 Tbps of combined capacity, with 108 open peers and 84% IPv6 adoption, present in four Nairobi facilities.
Stated without a number: traffic between two networks that are both present at KIXP is exchanged inside Nairobi rather than hauled to Europe and back. It removes an intercontinental round trip from the path. Lineserve peers at KIXP, so that applies to traffic between ke-1a and any other network present there. It does not by itself produce a millisecond figure, and it only helps for networks actually present — which is a fair question to put to any Nairobi facility you are considering, ours included.
136
Networks peering at KIXP, Nairobi (PeeringDB)
2.9 Tbps
Combined KIXP capacity (PeeringDB)
2.65M
Fixed subscriptions in Kenya (CA, Q1 2026)
480 km
Mombasa landing to Nairobi backhaul
The geography a colocation buyer should plan around
Every one of Kenya's international subsea systems lands at Mombasa — TEAMS, SEACOM, EASSy, LION2, DARE1 and PEACE — so traffic to a Nairobi facility crosses roughly 480 km of terrestrial fibre from the coast. The Communications Authority puts Kenya's lit international capacity at 28,130 Gbps for the quarter to March 2026, of which 17,759 Gbps was in use. That inland hop is where route diversity matters, and it is worth asking any Nairobi facility about it directly.
Where your users actually are
Of 2,656,653 fixed internet subscriptions in the quarter to March 2026, Safaricom holds 941,501, Jamii Telecommunications — Faiba — 517,270, Wananchi's Zuku 276,607 and Poa Internet 256,517, with Ahadi Wireless, Vilcom, Mawingu and a long tail behind them. On mobile the Authority counts 84,090,298 active SIMs. Your Kenyan users are on those networks, not on a European transit path.
Payments
Paying for a rack, in shillings
Colocation is not a card purchase. A quarter rack is a recurring commitment with a term behind it, and the invoice will usually exceed what anyone wants to push through a wallet. Kenya's advantage is that the rails for a payment that size already exist: Lineserve accepts M-Pesa and other mobile money, bank transfer, or card, billed in KES, with no foreign card and no forex conversion.
Bank transfer for a rack
A half or full rack invoice will normally exceed a single mobile-money transaction limit, so a transfer is the practical rail at that size — and the one your finance team will expect to use for a term commitment.
M-Pesa for smaller footprints
A single-U or small footprint sits in ordinary mobile-money territory. Mobile money penetration in Kenya is 100.1% of population, across 53,368,939 active subscriptions and 602,470 registered agents, with M-Pesa holding 89.1% of the market. The honest Kenyan argument is the reverse of the international one: you do not need a card.
Card if you prefer it
Visa and Mastercard work, in shillings. In this market they are the fallback rather than the default.
Colocation is quoted rather than sold from a price list. Terms, deposits and the payment schedule are agreed with [email protected] or +254 119 039 063 before anything ships.
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.
Kenya
+254 119 039 063Sales
[email protected]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.
Tax & invoicing
An invoice your accountant can actually file
A rack is a large enough recurring cost that finance will look at the paperwork before operations look at the power. 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, with cloud and hosting services squarely in scope. VAT falls due by the 20th of the month following the earlier of invoice, performance or payment, filed on a VAT3 return through iTax.
The commercially important part is what appears on the invoice. A Kenyan business buyer cannot claim the expense or the input VAT without a valid tax invoice carrying its own KRA PIN.
What a Kenyan tax invoice carries
The seller's KRA PIN and registered name; a unique invoice number with date and time; the buyer's KRA PIN on B2B sales; the item description and taxable value; the tax type and the VAT charged, shown separately; and the KRA control number and QR code returned when the invoice is transmitted.
Bring your invoicing requirements — and your questions about the tax treatment of hardware you intend to ship into Kenya — to [email protected] before you commit to a footprint, not after.
Data residency
Your hardware in Kenya, under Kenyan law
Kenya's Data Protection Act, No. 24 of 2019, is administered by the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner. Two features of it matter to anyone deciding where to put a machine, and a third matters to a small number of buyers a great deal.
Hosting abroad does not take you outside the Act
Section 4(b) reaches processing by a controller or processor who is not established or ordinarily resident in Kenya but processes personal data of data subjects located in Kenya. Location changes the practicalities, not the obligation.
Sending data out of Kenya is conditional, not forbidden
Sections 48 and 49 attach conditions to transferring personal data out of Kenya: appropriate safeguards demonstrated to the Data Commissioner, and for sensitive personal data, the data subject's consent plus confirmation of safeguards. Kenya does not ban transfers abroad — it attaches paperwork to them. Keeping the hardware in Nairobi means the transfer question does not arise for that data. That is a simplification, not a compliance claim.
Regulation 26, and where colocation sits in it
Section 50 of the Act lets the Cabinet Secretary require certain processing to be carried out through a server or data centre located in Kenya, and Regulation 26 of the Data Protection (General) Regulations, 2021 exercises that power for six listed purposes: civil registration and legal identity management; the conduct of elections; administering public finances by a state organ; running a system designated as protected under the Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act, 2018; basic education under the Basic Education Act, 2013; and primary or secondary health care. Where it applies, the controller must either process the data through a server and data centre located in Kenya or store at least one serving copy in one. What colocation gives you against that is location and nothing more: it is your server, in a data centre located in Kenya. Whether that discharges your obligation depends on your processing as a whole, which is a question for your own counsel and not one a hosting provider can answer for you. Outside those six purposes, putting the rack in Nairobi is a decision you make on speed, currency and control of your own hardware rather than on statute — and it holds up on all three.
What Lineserve supplies is space, power and access in Nairobi. Compliance under the Act remains yours — and in a colocation arrangement, where you operate the equipment, the controller and processor analysis is different from the managed-hosting case and worth putting to your own counsel.
Who colocates
Who colocates in Nairobi
Colocation buyers in Kenya look nothing like VPS buyers. They already own hardware, they have an opinion about it, and they are usually moving it from somewhere else.
Regional ISPs and WISPs
The Communications Authority's fixed-ISP table has a long tail behind the top four — Ahadi Wireless, Vilcom, Mawingu and a further 3.5% spread across dozens of regional operators. Their RADIUS and AAA, billing and provisioning stacks, recursive resolvers, NetFlow collectors, monitoring and looking-glass nodes have to sit in-country to be useful, and they run on the operator's own routers and servers.
SACCOs and deposit-taking microfinance
A distinctively Kenyan institution: core banking systems, member self-service portals, USSD channels, and month-end and dividend-run batch processing, often on appliances the SACCO bought and depreciates. Moving that out of a branch server room and into a facility is a common Kenyan project.
Digital credit providers and fintechs
M-Pesa callback receivers, loan-book databases, KYC document stores and credit-scoring batch jobs, frequently run on owned hardware for control reasons. Digital credit providers are one of the ODPC's restricted sectors, so they register as controllers regardless of size — which makes where the machines physically sit part of their own filing.
Media and broadcast
Nairobi carries an unusually strong media sector for a market its size, and its traffic is spiky in a very Kenyan way — general elections every five years in August, budget day in June, national exam results. That capacity is often owned rather than rented, because it is used hard for a week and idle for months.
Companies repatriating an office server room
The most common colocation conversation in Nairobi: a firm with a rack in a comms cupboard, an air conditioner that is the single point of failure, and a UPS nobody has load-tested. The hardware is usually fine. The building is the problem.
Migrating
From a server room, or from a rack abroad
From your own machine room
The hardware is usually not what fails. The building is: single-feed power, one air conditioner, a UPS with unknown runtime, and a generator that belongs to the landlord. Two numbers decide every conversation that follows — the power draw per unit and the rack layout — so measure them before you talk to anyone. Then ask every facility on your list, ours included, the same questions in writing: power topology and density per rack, cooling, the physical access procedure and who may use it, what remote hands covers and how fast, and what the SLA actually pays out. A colocation buyer should get those answers on paper, not from a web page.
From a rack abroad
A Kenyan business colocating in Europe pays in a foreign currency, sends an engineer on a plane for anything that needs a screwdriver, and carries the cross-border transfer question under sections 48 and 49 for any personal data on those machines. Moving to Nairobi turns the invoice into KES, puts the hardware in the same city and time zone as the team that runs it, and turns the transfer question into a non-question. That argument does not require saying anything unkind about a European facility. They are simply not in Kenya.
Nairobi hosting and a Kenyan IP are table stakes in this market rather than differentiators. Choose on the answers to the questions above, from whoever gives you the clearest ones.
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.
In Nairobi, in the ke-1a region. The Lineserve address on Utalii Lane, View Park Towers is an office in the Nairobi CBD — it is not the data centre.
Colocation is quoted per footprint rather than sold from a price list. Send your rack layout and power draw to [email protected] or call +254 119 039 063 for a KES quote.
In KES, by M-Pesa and other mobile money, bank transfer, or card. An invoice that size will normally exceed a single mobile-money transaction limit, so bank transfer is the practical rail.
KES. As a Kenyan customer you are billed in shillings, with no forex conversion and no foreign-transaction fee from your bank.
It applies to six named purposes — civil registration and legal identity management, elections, administering public finances by a state organ, designated protected computer systems, basic education, and primary or secondary health care. Where it applies, the processing must run through a server and data centre located in Kenya, or at least one serving copy of the personal data must be stored in one. If your system is not in those categories, Kenyan law does not generally require in-country hosting. Confirm the specifics against your own obligations with your counsel.
No — compliance is yours as the controller, in Nairobi or anywhere else. What a Nairobi facility gives you is residency: your data sits on your own hardware, in Kenya, so the cross-border transfer conditions in sections 48 and 49 do not arise for it, and you can point an auditor at a building in the same city as your office.
Kenya has a local line on +254 119 039 063, alongside [email protected]. Kenya is on East Africa Time year-round, with no daylight saving, so business hours mean one thing all year.
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