Linux VPS — hosted in Nairobi
Linux VPS Hosting in Kenya
Root, an SSH key and a Nairobi IP address. Sixty seconds.
Pick Ubuntu, Debian, Rocky, AlmaLinux, CentOS Stream or Fedora, paste in a public key, and have a Linux VPS running in Nairobi before the kettle boils. Full root, cloud-init on first boot, NVMe-backed storage, a dedicated IPv4 address and free IPv6 — and you pay with M-Pesa, with no card and no forex conversion.
- Full root and SSH key access on every plan
- Ubuntu, Debian, Rocky, AlmaLinux, CentOS Stream, Fedora
- Deploy in under 60 seconds with cloud-init
- Data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act — your data stays in-country
- Billed in KES · free DDoS protection · 99.9% uptime SLA
No credit card required · Local billing in KES, TZS & NGN
Pricing
Simple plans, billed in your currency
Pay in local currency — no cards, no forex surprises. Every plan is full root, full network, no throttling. Annual billing gets you two months free.
Linux VPS – 2 GB RAM
Small workloads and personal projects.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos
- 1 vCPU
- 2 GB RAM
- 40 GB SSD
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
Linux VPS – 4 GB RAM
Web servers and small databases.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos
- 2 vCPU
- 4 GB RAM
- 80 GB SSD
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
Linux VPS – 8 GB RAM
Production web applications.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos
- 4 vCPU
- 8 GB RAM
- 160 GB SSD
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
Linux VPS – 16 GB RAM
High-traffic applications.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos
- 8 vCPU
- 16 GB RAM
- 320 GB SSD
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
Linux VPS – 32 GB RAM
Enterprise applications.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos
- 16 vCPU
- 32 GB RAM
- 640 GB SSD
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
Linux VPS – 64 GB RAM
Massive workloads and consolidation.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos
- 32 vCPU
- 64 GB RAM
- 1280 GB SSD
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
Prices exclude VAT. Local currency figures are indicative and settled at checkout. Need more cores or memory? Talk to Sales.
Weighing up Windows too? Compare all Linux & Windows plans on the VPS Hosting page.
Network
The part of a request a CDN cannot cache
Most Kenyan sites of any size already sit behind a CDN, and a CDN is very good at the easy half of the problem: images, stylesheets, the marketing page nobody is logged into. The other half always goes home. The logged-in dashboard, the cart, the search query, the API call, the write to the database — every one of those reaches the origin, and where the origin sits is what decides how that half feels.
ke-1a is in Nairobi, so for a Kenyan visitor that half of the traffic stays inside the country. An origin in Frankfurt spends an ocean crossing on every uncached request: Kenya's international capacity all lands at Mombasa and is backhauled roughly 480 km inland to Nairobi, and that is the route out of the country for anything that has to leave it. A Nairobi origin serving Kenyan users simply does not take it. The cart write, the search query and the dashboard load all start and finish inside the city, on a path that never touches the coast.
Design for the handset while you are at it. In the Communications Authority of Kenya's figures for January–March 2026 there are 52,852,505 mobile broadband subscriptions against 2,656,653 fixed ones, so most of the people waiting on your first byte are on mobile data. The last mile of that path is not yours to improve. The distance from the handset to the origin is.
Payments
A wallet, not a card — and not once a quarter
The Kenyan developer buying a Linux VPS is not making an annual procurement decision. It is an instance this month, a staging box next month, and a client moved onto something larger when the traffic justifies it. The payment method has to suit that rhythm, and in Kenya that means mobile money: the Communications Authority counts over 53 million active mobile money subscriptions and more than 600,000 agents. Cards are the alternative here, not the default.
Priced in shillings, per instance
Every plan on this page is quoted in KES. You are billed in shillings, so nothing converts between the price you compared and the amount that leaves your account.
Built for adding one box at a time
Spinning up a second instance is a small recurring amount on a rail you already use, not a procurement cycle and not a foreign card transaction that your bank may query.
Card and bank transfer when you need them
Some teams would rather pay by card, and finance departments often prefer a bank transfer for anything sizeable. Both work; neither is the assumption.
What's included
Everything on every plan
No feature tiers, no upsell traps. Every Linux VPS ships with the full stack — you only choose how much compute you need.
Full root & SSH
Complete root access and SSH key auth from first boot. It's your server, all of it.
Any Linux distro
Ubuntu, Debian, Rocky, AlmaLinux, and Fedora, with more images added regularly.
NVMe SSD storage
Enterprise NVMe drives for fast boot, quick builds, and low-latency databases.
Free DDoS protection
Always-on network-layer mitigation included on every plan at no extra cost.
Cloud-init ready
Bootstrap your server on deploy with cloud-init user data — no manual first-run setup.
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.
IPv4 & IPv6
A dedicated IPv4 address plus native IPv6 included on every instance.
API & CLI
Automate everything through a clean API and command-line tool. Infrastructure as code, natively.
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
Your stack, your way
Pick your distro. Build it your way.
Start from a clean, current base image and take it wherever you need. No forced defaults, no bloat — just the distribution you already know.
- Deploy Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS Stream, Rocky, AlmaLinux, or Fedora, all kept current.
- Choose your image at deploy time, or bring your own with a custom ISO.
- Cloud-init runs your setup on first boot — packages, users, and keys, done.
- Rebuild to a different distro whenever you want on a fresh instance.
Available images
Updated regularly
Deep dive: Ubuntu VPS · Debian VPS · CentOS Stream VPS · Rocky Linux VPS · AlmaLinux VPS · Fedora VPS
Use cases
Built for the way you run Linux
Web apps & APIs
Run Node, Python, Go, PHP, or Ruby behind Nginx with room to grow.
Docker & containers
A clean host for Docker, Compose, and lightweight Kubernetes, close to your users.
Databases
Self-host PostgreSQL, MySQL, or Redis on fast NVMe with the RAM real workloads need.
CI runners & dev boxes
Spin up build runners, staging environments, and disposable dev servers on demand.
How it works
Live in three steps
Choose region & image
Pick Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, or Lagos, then your distro and compute size.
Deploy in under 60 seconds
We provision your server and run your cloud-init — no manual setup.
Connect over SSH
Log in with your SSH key and full root. Your server is ready to build on.
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 063Sales
[email protected]Why Lineserve
Decided on what actually matters here
Data residency
Where the database lives, and who has to register
For a Linux workload the personal data is usually enumerable, which makes this a shorter conversation than it is on a desktop. It is the Postgres or MySQL volume, the nightly dump beside it, the application log with a phone number in it, the session store, and the bucket of uploaded ID documents. On ke-1a all of that is in Nairobi.
Kenya's Data Protection Act, No. 24 of 2019 reaches controllers and processors who are not established in Kenya but process personal data of people in Kenya, so moving the database to Europe does not move you out of the Act. Sections 48 and 49 do not forbid sending personal data abroad either — they attach conditions. Keeping it in Nairobi means you are not running that analysis for that data at all.
The obligation Kenyan teams underestimate most often, though, is not about location.
Section 18: registering is yours to do, whoever hosts you
Section 18 of the Act says no person shall act as a data controller or data processor unless registered with the Data Commissioner, with thresholds set by the Commissioner. Entities under KES 5 million turnover with fewer than ten employees may fall below the threshold — but not in restricted sectors. Financial services, telecommunications, health, education, insurance, betting and public bodies must register regardless of size, which covers a large share of the people who buy a VPS in Nairobi. Registration fees run from KES 4,000 for micro and small entities to KES 40,000 for large ones.
Lineserve supplies the location — data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act, with your data held in Nairobi and not moved out of Kenya without your instruction. Your section 18 registration is yours to file, and it is the same filing wherever the server sits; hosting in ke-1a just means the answer to "where is the data?" is Nairobi.
Who runs here
What actually gets installed on a Linux box in ke-1a
WordPress, WooCommerce and client sites
The commonest instance in this market is somebody's client site: WordPress behind a cache, a WooCommerce store where checkout is felt by the shopper at the moment of payment, and a set of .co.ke domains pointed at one box. The same instance usually carries the staging copy of each of them.
Application servers
Node, Django, Laravel, Rails or Spring behind Nginx, with a queue worker and a cron that runs when you said it would. For a Kenyan product this is also where the M-Pesa Daraja callback receiver lives, and a callback that starts inside Kenya has less to cross to reach an endpoint that is also inside Kenya.
Databases, caches and queues
Postgres, MySQL, Redis and the nightly dump. This is the workload where residency stops being an abstraction: the volume holding the customer table is the thing people mean when they ask whether their data is in Kenya.
Control panels and multi-tenant hosting
CyberPanel, Plesk, cPanel or Virtualmin on one instance with several clients behind it, and root underneath so the PHP version, the Nginx rules and the certificate renewals are yours to set rather than yours to request.
Build, staging and deploy
A staging environment on the same box or the next one over, a deploy that is a git push rather than an FTP upload, and a CI runner that does not queue behind somebody else's job. Cheap to keep running, and the piece shared hosting cannot sell you at any price.
Migrating
Off shared hosting, or back from Europe
From shared cPanel hosting
The reason to leave is rarely price. It is that you want your own PHP version, your own Nginx rules, a cron that actually fires, Redis, a queue worker, and a deploy that is a git push. A VPS is all of that, with the trade that the updates, the firewall and the certificate renewals become your job. If somebody on the team wants that job, a VPS repays it within a week. If nobody does, stay on shared hosting until somebody does — an unpatched box in Nairobi is worse than a managed one anywhere.
From a European or US budget VPS
Nairobi developers have bought overseas capacity for years, for good reasons: it is cheap, it is API-driven and it works. Two things change once the users are Kenyan. Every uncached request crosses an ocean and comes back, and every invoice is a foreign-currency card transaction. Moving the origin to ke-1a addresses both, and the move itself is the ordinary one — rsync the files, dump and restore the database, drop the DNS TTL a day ahead and cut over. Where a CDN was doing the work of hiding the distance, you may find you need less of it.
Whichever direction you are coming from, keep the old server running until the new one has served real traffic for a few days. An overlap costs one month; a bad cutover costs more than that.
FAQ
Questions, answered
Yes. Every Linux VPS gives you complete root access and SSH key authentication from the moment it boots. It's your server to configure however you like.
You can deploy Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS Stream, Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, or Fedora at launch, all kept current. You can also bring your own image with a custom ISO.
Yes. Resize to a larger plan as your workload grows, with minimal downtime. Compute and storage scale together across the tiers.
Under 60 seconds. Your server provisions and runs any cloud-init user data you provide, so it's ready to use — not just powered on.
Yes. Our team assists with moving existing Linux workloads into Lineserve at no extra charge. Reach out to support to plan the move.
Every plan supports on-demand snapshots and scheduled automated backups. Snapshot storage is billed per GB beyond your included allowance.
Yes. Every instance includes native IPv6 alongside a dedicated IPv4 address, at no extra cost.
That is your question as the data controller, not ours as the host. Section 18 of the Data Protection Act requires controllers and processors to register with the Data Commissioner, with thresholds set by the Commissioner, and entities in restricted sectors — financial services, telecommunications, health, education, insurance, betting and public bodies — must register regardless of size. Where you host does not change that either way.
One dedicated public IPv4 address and a /64 of IPv6, on every plan including the smallest, on an instance in ke-1a in Nairobi.
For the part of a request a CDN cannot cache — the logged-in dashboard, the cart, the search, the write — yes. On a Safaricom, Faiba, Zuku or Poa connection that traffic stays inside Kenya and is exchanged at KIXP in Nairobi, where a European origin would send every one of those requests to Mombasa, across a subsea cable and back again before your user sees anything.
Yes. You have full root, so several client sites, a control panel and their staging copies on one instance is a normal configuration — it is the standard Nairobi agency setup.
Yes, by the licence. Linux images are free, so the 2 GB plan is KES 2,195 where the 2 GB Windows plan is KES 3,195. The KES 1,000 gap is the Windows Server 2022 Standard licence at KES 250 per vCPU per month on a four-core minimum — worth paying when the software you need does not ship for Linux, and worth keeping when it does.
Deploy your Linux VPS in under 60 seconds
Full root, 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