ke-1a — Nairobi
Where your data lives in Kenya
ke-1a is a Nairobi region: the compute, the storage and the network endpoint are all in the city, and so is KIXP, where Kenyan networks hand traffic to each other. Lineserve peers there. What that buys is ordinary and valuable — a request from a Kenyan user reaches your instance and returns without leaving the country, and your data sits under Kenyan law rather than someone else's. Dar es Salaam and Lagos are on the same account when you want a copy somewhere else.
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
Kenya's internet has a shape. This is where ke-1a sits in it.
Start at the coast, because that is where Kenya's international capacity arrives. Every subsea cable serving the country lands at Mombasa — TEAMS, SEACOM, EASSy, LION2, DARE1 and PEACE — and not one of them 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. The Communications Authority of Kenya put lit international bandwidth at 28,130 Gbps in the quarter to March 2026, with 17,759 Gbps of it in use and SEACOM alone accounting for 10,500 Gbps. That is the pipe out of the country, and it is a long way from your users. The argument for a Nairobi region is how seldom your traffic needs to touch it.
Kenyan networks meet each other in Nairobi, at KIXP. The Kenya Internet Exchange Point is run by TESPOK, the country's service-provider association, and has operated in its current form since February 2002. PeeringDB records 136 peer networks, 151 connections and 2.9 Tbps of combined capacity, with 108 of those networks peering openly. Lineserve peers at KIXP. When your visitor's network is there too — and most Kenyan networks of any size are — the traffic between you is handed over inside Nairobi instead of taking a trip to Europe and back to cross a city.
Those networks have names your buyers already know. In the Authority's January–March 2026 figures, Safaricom held 941,501 fixed subscriptions, Jamii Telecommunications — Faiba — 517,270, Wananchi's Zuku 276,607 and Poa Internet 256,517, out of 2,656,653 nationally, with Ahadi Wireless, Vilcom, Mawingu and Liquid behind them. Mobile is the larger story by an order of magnitude: 84,090,298 active SIMs, 52,852,505 mobile broadband subscriptions and 50,175,502 smartphones in use, Safaricom holding 68.9% of subscriptions. Your reader is on one of those, on a handset, waiting on your time to first byte. Every one of them is inside Kenya. So is ke-1a.
Region choice is the last piece. ke-1a, tz-1a in Dar es Salaam and ng-1a in Lagos run from one account, one API and one bill, so a Nairobi primary with a standby copy in another country is a deployment decision rather than a second supplier and a second invoice. Object storage has a per-region endpoint — ke-1a.s3.lineserve.net — so the bucket serving a Kenyan application is in the same city as the application.
136
Networks peering at KIXP, Nairobi (PeeringDB)
2.9 Tbps
Combined KIXP capacity (PeeringDB)
28,130 Gbps
Lit international capacity (CA, Q1 2026)
480 km
Mombasa cable landings to Nairobi
Peering, in plain terms
Two networks present at the same exchange hand traffic straight to each other there. Nothing about it is exotic. It takes an intercontinental round trip out of a path that had no business taking one, for the networks that are actually at the exchange — 136 of them in Nairobi. KIXP also records 84% IPv6 adoption across the platform, so the modern half of Kenyan traffic is exchanged locally as well.
Who else is in the room
Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, Meta, China Mobile International and Starlink all peer at KIXP alongside the Kenyan ISPs. The practical effect for you is that the networks your users pull video, updates and third-party APIs from are reachable over the same Nairobi fabric your origin is on, rather than only over the cable to Mombasa.
One city, four buildings
KIXP is not a single room: it is present in four Nairobi facilities, which is why "is your provider in Nairobi" and "is your provider on the exchange" are two separate questions with two separate answers. Ask both of anyone quoting you Kenyan hosting.
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
Data residency
Choosing a region is choosing a legal system
Latency is the reason most people give for hosting in Nairobi. Jurisdiction is the reason the decision is hard to reverse. Kenya's Data Protection Act, No. 24 of 2019, is administered by the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner, and it does not care where your servers are — it follows the people whose data you hold. Section 4(b) applies the Act to a controller or processor not established or ordinarily resident in Kenya, but processing personal data of data subjects located in Kenya. A rack in Frankfurt moves the disks. It leaves the obligation exactly where it was.
What the region changes is how much paperwork sits between you and an ordinary operation. Sections 48 and 49 make sending personal data out of Kenya conditional rather than forbidden: appropriate safeguards demonstrated to the Data Commissioner, or one of the listed grounds, and for sensitive personal data the data subject's consent as well. Hold that data in ke-1a and those sections have nothing to act on, because no record has crossed a border. That is a simpler operating position, and it is also the shortest possible answer when a regulator, a bank's onboarding team or a donor's audit asks where the data is.
Regulation 26, and how narrow it is
Section 50 lets the Cabinet Secretary require certain processing to run through a server or data centre located in Kenya. 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. Those systems need in-country processing, or at least one serving copy of the data in a Kenyan data centre. ke-1a is in Nairobi. Most Kenyan businesses fall outside the list entirely, and any page telling them otherwise is overselling.
Registration is about you, not the building
Section 18 requires data controllers and processors to register with the Data Commissioner, with a size threshold that does not apply at all in restricted sectors — financial services, telecommunications, health, education, insurance, betting, public bodies. That obligation is yours wherever you host. Region choice settles where the data is; it does not settle your own filings, and a provider who blurs the two is doing you no favours.
What ke-1a supplies is location: data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act, with your data held in Nairobi and not moved out of the country without your instruction. Your obligations as a controller stay yours.
Who chooses a region on purpose
The workloads that care which country the machine is in
For plenty of applications the region is a shrug. For these, it is the requirement that came first and everything else was fitted around it.
Digital lenders and fintechs
M-Pesa integration endpoints receiving Safaricom callbacks, credit-scoring runs over alternative data, KYC document stores, loan books, USSD gateway backends. The Central Bank licenses digital credit providers under its 2022 regulations, and the Data Commissioner has published guidance aimed specifically at them. The callbacks originate in Kenya, the supervision is Kenyan, and the personal data is about Kenyans.
SACCOs and cooperative finance
Core banking, member self-service portals, mobile and USSD channels, month-end and dividend batch runs, collection reconciliation. Deposit-taking SACCOs answer to SASRA, hold members' personal and financial records, and run systems whose downtime is visible to a membership rather than to a support queue. A Nairobi region and a dedicated server are the usual shape.
ISPs, WISPs and network operators
RADIUS and AAA, recursive resolvers and authoritative zones, billing and provisioning stacks, NetFlow collectors, Zabbix and LibreNMS, speedtest and looking-glass endpoints. The Authority's fixed-ISP table has a long regional tail behind the four large names, and those operators buy small instances several at a time. These workloads are meaningless outside the country they serve, and the buyer will run a traceroute before reading a word of this page.
Public-interest systems
Health information platforms, survey and form servers collecting field submissions, education systems, county revenue and public finance applications. This is where Regulation 26 lands hardest — basic education, primary and secondary health care and public finance administration are named purposes — so region choice here is a design constraint rather than a preference.
Media and publishing
Nairobi's news sector has a traffic curve most markets do not: election cycles, budget day in June and exam-results days are hard, predictable, single-day spikes on top of an ordinary load. A resizable instance behind a cache absorbs that; a fixed box bought for the average does not.
Agencies, MSPs and ISVs
Multi-tenant client hosting, staging environments, control-panel stacks, Git-based deploys, client mail. One buyer, many sites, and a client base that asks where their site is hosted more often than it used to. Object storage, dedicated hardware and two more regions sit on the same account when a client grows out of the first instance.
Choosing
How to check where a server actually is
From a region that is not in Kenya
Moving is routine — provision, sync, dump and restore, run both for a day, cut the DNS. What changes afterwards is the shape of every request your Kenyan users make: the path stops running down to Mombasa, out under the Indian Ocean and back, and the Nairobi exchange does the work instead. The commercial side changes too. You are billed in shillings by an entity registered for VAT in Kenya, on a rail you already use, with a Nairobi number to call when something breaks at 02:00 EAT.
From a Kenya-branded product served elsewhere
Some products sold for this market are delivered from Johannesburg or Europe with a Kenyan name on the tin. That is a legitimate way to sell hosting, and it is worth knowing which one you have bought, because it decides how far your customers' packets travel and which country's law your data sits under. One question settles it: which city is the machine in, and is the provider willing to name it? For a Lineserve instance the answer is ke-1a, Nairobi.
You can check it yourself in a minute. Run a traceroute from a Kenyan connection and watch where the path terminates; ping from a Nairobi network and then from a European one and compare the two; look up which networks the destination address is announced through. Then ask the provider what their uptime SLA pays out when it is missed, and who has to claim it.
FAQ
Questions, answered
In Nairobi. Compute, storage and the network endpoint for the region are all in the city, and instances you create there stay there unless you move them yourself.
Yes. ke-1a's traffic to other networks present at the Kenya Internet Exchange Point is exchanged inside Nairobi. PeeringDB lists 136 networks, 151 connections and 2.9 Tbps of combined capacity there.
For traffic between your instance and a Kenyan network that is also at KIXP, the path is a domestic one — Nairobi to Nairobi — rather than a route out to a European interconnection point and back. It applies to the networks present at the exchange, which in Kenya covers the large fixed and mobile operators and the big content networks.
Traceroute to it from a Kenyan connection and watch where the path ends, then repeat from a network outside the country and compare. Look up the address and see which networks announce it. Any provider's claim about location survives that test or it does not.
All of them at Mombasa — TEAMS, SEACOM, EASSy, LION2, DARE1 and PEACE — and the capacity is backhauled roughly 480 km inland to Nairobi. The Communications Authority reported 28,130 Gbps of lit international bandwidth in the quarter to March 2026, of which 17,759 Gbps was in use. Anything of yours that leaves the country goes to the coast first, which is a good reason for the traffic that does not have to leave to stay put.
Traffic between your instance and Kenyan users on networks present in Nairobi is exchanged in Nairobi. Traffic to anywhere outside the country leaves through the Mombasa landings like everyone else's. The difference a Nairobi region makes is to the first category, which for a Kenyan business is most of it.
Yes. Every instance gets a dedicated public IPv4 address and a free /64 IPv6 block. KIXP records 84% IPv6 adoption across its peers, so v6 in Kenya is a working default rather than a future project.
Yes. Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and Lagos are one account, one API and one bill. A common shape is a Nairobi primary with backups or a standby in another region. If the data is personal data about Kenyans, treat the copy as a cross-border transfer and take the same advice you would for any other export.
No — compliance belongs to you as the data controller, in whichever country the server sits. What a Nairobi region gives you is residency: your personal data is held in Kenya, so the cross-border transfer conditions in sections 48 and 49 do not arise for it, and the answer to "where is our customer data" is the name of a city your regulator can reach.
Regulation 26 requires processing through a server and data centre located in Kenya, or at least one serving copy of the data in a Kenyan data centre, for six named purposes: civil registration and identity, elections, public finance administration, protected computer systems, basic education, and primary or secondary health care. ke-1a is in Nairobi. Take the specifics of your own obligation to your counsel.
Cloud servers and VPS on Linux or Windows, dedicated servers, and S3-compatible object storage on the ke-1a.s3.lineserve.net endpoint. Colocation in Nairobi is quoted rather than listed — send the rack, power and cross-connect requirements to [email protected].
A published 99.9% uptime SLA, with always-on DDoS mitigation on every instance, on-demand snapshots and scheduled backups. Ask any provider what the SLA pays out when it is missed and whether you have to claim it — the number matters less than the remedy.
Yes: +254 119 039 063 and [email protected], with the Nairobi address in the footer. Kenya is on East Africa Time all year with no daylight saving, so business hours mean one thing in January and the same thing in July.