Partners in Kenya
Sell Nairobi hosting under your own name
Resell cloud servers, VPS, dedicated hardware and object storage in ke-1a under your own brand, refer business and earn on it, or build your product on the platform. You buy at wholesale in KES and set your own retail, so your cost stops moving every time the shilling does. Your clients stay yours — your brand on the panel, your invoice, your relationship — with a Nairobi region and a Nairobi number behind you.
Ways to partner
Find the program that fits you
Reseller partners
White-label hosting and cloud you sell under your own brand. Wholesale pricing, your retail, your margin — with local billing you can pass straight to your clients.
For: agencies, IT firms, web professionals.
Become a resellerReferral partners
Send business our way and earn on what you refer. No support burden — you make the introduction, we handle delivery.
For: consultants, freelancers, communities.
Join the referral programTechnology partners
Build your product or service on Lineserve, integrate with our platform, and go to market together.
For: ISVs, SaaS builders, systems integrators.
Explore technology partnershipsWhat you are reselling
A Nairobi region you can point at
The first question a Kenyan client asks a reseller is where the site will actually be. ke-1a is in Nairobi, and Lineserve peers at KIXP — the Kenya Internet Exchange Point, run by TESPOK, where PeeringDB records 136 peer networks, 151 connections and 2.9 Tbps of combined capacity. Traffic between your client's site and a Kenyan network present at the exchange is handed over inside the city, rather than routed out through the Mombasa cable landings and back. You can say that in a proposal, and the client can check it with a traceroute.
Underneath the brand you put on it, the product is infrastructure rather than a resold control panel: an API and a CLI, snapshots and scheduled backups, private networking between instances, live resize of vCPU, RAM and storage, a free /64 IPv6 on every instance, always-on DDoS mitigation and a published 99.9% uptime SLA. Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and Lagos sit on one account, so a client with an East African footprint is a second region rather than a second supplier.
The whole catalogue, one relationship
Cloud servers and VPS on Linux or Windows, dedicated servers, and S3-compatible object storage with a per-region endpoint. A client who starts on a small instance and grows into dedicated hardware never leaves your book to do it — and colocation in Nairobi is quoted when a client turns up with their own boxes.
Money
You get paid the way Kenya pays, and so do we
Mobile money is not an alternative payment method here — it is the default, and the card is the alternative. The Communications Authority counts 53,368,939 active mobile money subscriptions and 602,470 registered agents, at 100.1% penetration, with M-Pesa on 89.1% of the market. That is how your clients will settle with you, and it is how you settle with us. Nothing in the chain has to touch a dollar.
M-Pesa
Pay your wholesale invoice in shillings from the same rail your clients use to pay you. Nothing converts, no international transaction lands on your statement, and your bank adds no foreign-transaction fee. Kenyan VAT at 16% is added at checkout.
Bank transfer
The rail for the size of invoice a growing book produces. A partner running twenty client instances, or committing annually at ten months for twelve, is writing a transfer rather than pushing a mobile payment — and it lands with a reference your accounts team can reconcile.
Card
Visa and Mastercard, in KES, for the finance teams that prefer a card on file. It works, and for some partners it is the right answer. It is simply not the assumption this market runs on.
The advantage
Built to make partners money, locally
Real margin
Wholesale pricing with room to set your own retail and keep the difference.
White-label
Sell hosting and cloud under your brand, not ours, where it counts.
Local billing
Pay in KES, TZS, or NGN and invoice your clients in the currency they actually use — no forex eating your margin.
One platform
Hosting, cloud servers, storage, and dedicated hardware for every client, from a single relationship.
Local support
Back your clients with a support team in your region and timezone.
Grow without limits
Start with a handful of clients and scale into a full book of business on the same terms.
How it works
From application to earning
Apply
Tell us about your business and how you want to partner. We review and get back to you quickly.
Onboard
Get set up with wholesale pricing, white-label configuration, and everything you need to sell.
Sell & earn
Bring on clients under your brand, bill them locally, and grow your recurring revenue.
Who it's for
Made for the people building the region's web
Web & digital agencies
Bundle hosting and cloud into your client projects.
IT service providers & MSPs
Offer managed infrastructure without building your own.
Consultants & freelancers
Refer clients and earn, or resell under your name.
ISVs & SaaS builders
Run and ship your product on local infrastructure.
Our ecosystem
Built on trusted foundations
Lineserve runs on carrier-neutral, Tier III facilities and local connectivity across the region — the partners whose infrastructure underpins ours. These are suppliers to Lineserve, not resellers.
Three in-country regions
Nairobi (ke-1a), Dar es Salaam (tz-1a) and Lagos (ng-1a) — each in the country it serves, so your client's data sits where their regulator expects to find it.
On the local exchange
KIXP carries 136 peer networks across four Nairobi facilities, and Lineserve peers there — so traffic between your client and another Kenyan network is handed over inside Nairobi rather than in Europe.
Get started
Let's build something together
Tell us how you'd like to partner and we'll take it from there.
Prefer email? Reach us at [email protected].
FAQ
Partnership questions, answered
There's no cost to apply. Reseller partners buy at wholesale rates and set their own retail; referral partners earn on what they refer.
Yes. Reseller partners get white-label hosting and cloud, so your clients see your brand, not ours.
However you like. You pay Lineserve at wholesale in local currency and invoice your clients in the currency and on the terms you choose.
You own the client relationship; we back you with infrastructure support in your timezone. Managed options are available if you want us closer to the front line.
We aim to review applications and respond within two business days.
Yes. Many partners resell some services and refer others. Tell us your model and we'll set it up.
Nothing to apply and nothing to hold the status. Reseller partners buy at wholesale rates in KES and set their own retail; referral partners earn on what they refer. Talk to [email protected] for the current wholesale terms.
Yes. The reseller programme is white-label, so your clients see your brand rather than ours. You own the client relationship, the pricing and the invoice.
KES. You are quoted, invoiced and settled in shillings, by M-Pesa, bank transfer or card, with no forex conversion and no foreign-transaction fee — which is what makes a stable retail price list possible.
However you like. You buy at wholesale, you set retail, and you invoice your clients in the currency and on the terms you choose. Most Kenyan partners bill in shillings and collect by M-Pesa, because that is what their clients already do.
Kenya's standard VAT rate is 16% and Lineserve Limited is registered for VAT in Kenya, so your wholesale invoice is a Kenyan tax invoice with the VAT shown on it. For a VAT-registered partner that is input tax against the VAT you charge your clients — take your own position to your accountant, but the paperwork is the Kenyan kind.
In ke-1a, our Nairobi region, unless you choose otherwise. Dar es Salaam and Lagos are available on the same account for clients who want a second country, and the region is per instance rather than per account.
You own the client relationship and the front line; we back you with infrastructure support in East Africa Time, on +254 119 039 063 and by ticket. Managed options exist if you want us closer to your clients — say so during onboarding.
Yes. Cloud servers, VPS on Linux or Windows, dedicated hardware and S3-compatible object storage are all on the same account, so a client can move up the range without leaving your book. Colocation in Nairobi is quoted rather than listed.
Register it with any KENIC-accredited registrar and point it at a Lineserve instance — set the A and AAAA records and it is live. The domain stays your relationship with the registrar; the hosting comes from us.
No. Start with one client and grow the book on the same terms. Annual billing is available at ten months for twelve if you would rather match a client's annual contract.
Yes. Many partners resell for some clients and refer others — the two are not exclusive. Describe your model on the application and it is set up that way.
We aim to review applications and respond within two business days. Onboarding after that covers wholesale pricing, white-label configuration, the invoicing details above and access to the API and CLI.
That the data is held in Nairobi, which gives them data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act and keeps the cross-border transfer conditions out of the picture. Registration with the Data Commissioner and their obligations as a data controller remain theirs, and saying that plainly tends to build more trust than claiming otherwise.
Turn local infrastructure into your advantage
Resell it, refer it, or build on it — under your brand, billed locally, supported in your timezone.
No cost to apply · Local billing · Response within 2 business days
Margin and tax
Why a shilling cost is worth more than a discount
A reseller whose wholesale cost is a dollar figure cannot publish a price list and mean it. Every move in the exchange rate is a margin change on a book of clients already sold, and the card issuer's spread quietly takes a slice on top. Buy in KES and the arithmetic goes still: your cost per instance is a number you can put in a spreadsheet, your retail is a number you choose, and the difference between them is the same in November as it was in March. That is worth more over a year than most headline discounts, and it is the reason a local wholesale price is a commercial product rather than a convenience.
Then the tax side, which is where local billing stops being cosmetic. Kenya's standard VAT rate is 16%, and the Kenya Revenue Authority treats digital marketplace supplies — cloud backup, email hosting, software subscriptions — as taxable. Lineserve Limited is registered for VAT in Kenya, so what arrives is a Kenyan tax invoice with the 16% shown on it, not a foreign receipt your accountant has to argue about. For a VAT-registered partner that is input tax against the VAT you charge your own clients, and the expense is one your auditor recognises on sight.
Set the invoice up before the first order
Send [email protected] your KRA PIN, your registered name exactly as KRA holds it, and any purchase-order reference your system needs, and it is on the invoice from the first billing run rather than reconstructed at year end. If you bill your own clients annually, ask about annual terms at the same time — one approval, one payment, one document for the file.
Prices exclude VAT; 16% is added at checkout. Talk to [email protected] about wholesale terms and invoicing requirements before you place the first order.
What you can promise a client
"Your data is in Nairobi" is a sentence that closes deals
Every partner selling to a Kenyan bank, SACCO, insurer, lender, hospital group or county project meets the same question in procurement: where is the data held. Kenya's Data Protection Act, No. 24 of 2019, administered by the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner, applies to processing about people in Kenya whether the processor sits in Nairobi or in Frankfurt — so moving the server abroad moves the disks and leaves the obligation behind. Hosting the client in ke-1a gives you the short answer: the data is in Kenya, and the cross-border transfer conditions in sections 48 and 49 have nothing to act on.
Where it bites hardest is the public-interest end of the market. 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 administration, protected computer systems, basic education, and primary or secondary health care. If your client's system is one of those, region choice is a tender requirement rather than a preference, and a partner who can answer it in the first meeting is already ahead of one who has to go and ask.
Residency is what the region supplies. Registration with the Data Commissioner and the controller obligations stay with your client — and saying so plainly is what makes the rest of your pitch credible.
Who this suits
The Kenyan businesses that make the best partners
The programme suits anyone who already owns a client relationship and is currently sending the hosting revenue somewhere else.
Web and digital agencies
You already build the sites and already choose the host; the hosting line is the one part of the project you hand to someone abroad. Multi-tenant instances, staging environments, control-panel stacks and Git-based deploys, billed to you in shillings and to your client under your name. Register the domain wherever you like and point it at the instance.
IT service providers and MSPs
Managed infrastructure for a book of Nairobi and county clients without buying a rack or hiring a data-centre engineer. Backup targets in object storage, a standby region in Dar es Salaam or Lagos for clients who want geographic separation, and dedicated hardware when a workload outgrows shared compute.
ISPs and WISPs
Behind Safaricom, Faiba, Zuku and Poa, the Communications Authority's fixed-ISP table has a long regional tail. Those operators already sell connectivity to businesses that also need hosting, and the systems they run themselves — RADIUS, resolvers, billing portals, monitoring, looking glass — belong in Nairobi anyway. Resell what you are already buying for yourself.
Fintech and SACCO integrators
If you implement core banking, member portals, USSD channels or lending platforms, your clients are supervised, their data is personal and financial, and their procurement asks where it lives. Sell them the answer along with the software, on infrastructure you can resize when the month-end batch grows.
ISVs and SaaS builders
Run your product in ke-1a and sell it to Kenyan customers without explaining a foreign region in every security review. The API and CLI make provisioning per-tenant infrastructure a deployment step, and a technology partnership covers the go-to-market side when your product is the thing being sold.
Consultants and freelancers
If you would rather not carry support and billing, refer the client and earn on what you refer. You make the introduction, we handle delivery, and you keep the advisory relationship that made the introduction worth something in the first place.
Getting started
Moving a book, or starting one
You already resell hosting from abroad
Move the clients that benefit most first — the ones whose users are all in Kenya and whose sites feel it. Each migration is the usual work: provision, sync, dump and restore, run both for a day, cut the DNS. Do the commercial move at the same time. Your cost stops being a dollar figure that changes under you, your invoice starts being a Kenyan tax invoice you can claim against, and the answer to "where is my site" becomes Nairobi. Keep the clients who genuinely serve European users where they are; honest region advice is what keeps a partner relationship long.
You do not sell hosting yet
Plenty of agencies and IT firms hand the hosting line to the client to buy themselves, and watch a recurring revenue stream walk out with it. Start narrow: one client, one instance, your brand on it, and a price you set. The programme costs nothing to join, there is no minimum book to qualify, and the panel, backups and SLA are the same ones a large partner gets. Add the second client when the first one renews.
Apply with a short description of your business and how you want to partner — reselling, referring, or building on the platform. Most applications are reviewed within two business days, and onboarding covers wholesale pricing, white-label configuration and the billing setup above.