Windows VPS — hosted in Nairobi
Windows VPS Hosting in Kenya
A licensed Windows desktop in Nairobi, billed in shillings.
Deploy a fully licensed Windows Server instance in Nairobi in under 60 seconds. You get RDP, full administrator rights, NVMe storage and a dedicated IPv4 address — and the Windows Server licence is inside the KES price, not a separate purchase you have to source and renew. Pay with M-Pesa, bank transfer or card.
- Windows Server 2022 licence included and pre-activated
- RDP and full administrator rights from first boot
- Deploy in under 60 seconds
- Data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act — your data stays in-country
- Billed in KES · 99.9% uptime SLA
No credit card required · Local billing in KES, TZS & NGN
Pricing
Simple plans, billed in your currency
Windows licensing included on every plan. Pay in local currency — no cards, no forex surprises. Annual billing gets you two months free.
WIN-S2
Windows Server for web applications.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos
- 1 vCPU
- 2 GB RAM
- 40 GB NVMe
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
- Windows Server 2022 license included
WIN-M1
Windows Server for production apps.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos
- 2 vCPU
- 4 GB RAM
- 80 GB NVMe
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
- Windows Server 2022 license included
WIN-L1
Windows Server for high-traffic apps.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos
- 4 vCPU
- 8 GB RAM
- 160 GB NVMe
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
- Windows Server 2022 license included
WIN-XL1
Windows Server for enterprise apps.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos
- 8 vCPU
- 16 GB RAM
- 320 GB NVMe
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
- Windows Server 2022 license included
WIN-XXL
Windows Server for large-scale apps.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos
- 16 vCPU
- 32 GB RAM
- 640 GB NVMe
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
- Windows Server 2022 license included
WIN-XXXL
Windows Server at maximum scale.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos
- 32 vCPU
- 64 GB RAM
- 1280 GB NVMe
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
- Windows Server 2022 license included
Prices exclude VAT. Local currency figures are indicative and settled at checkout. Need a custom configuration? Talk to Sales.
Weighing up Linux too? Compare all Linux & Windows plans on the VPS Hosting page.
Network
A desktop is felt differently from a web page
A web server is judged on how long a page takes to arrive. A Windows VPS is judged on the mouse. You drag a window, type into a form, tab between cells in a spreadsheet and wait for a chart to redraw — and RDP puts the whole path between your laptop and the server into that. Where the machine physically sits matters more for an interactive desktop than for almost anything else in hosting.
ke-1a is in Nairobi, so a session opened from a Kenyan office reaches it without leaving the country. A desktop hosted in Europe has no such option: every Kenyan international cable lands at Mombasa and is backhauled roughly 480 km inland, so each keystroke you send and each frame that comes back goes to the coast and under the sea first, twice, before the cursor moves. On ke-1a that same keystroke crosses Nairobi and comes back. You drag a window and it goes where you put it.
Payments
One shilling price with the licence inside it
Windows hosting usually arrives as two purchases: the machine from one supplier, and a Windows Server licence from another, quoted in a currency you do not earn in. Here it is a single KES price, billed in shillings by M-Pesa, bank transfer or card — and the licence component is arithmetic you can check rather than a figure you have to take on trust. Windows Server 2022 Standard is charged at KES 250 per vCPU per month on a minimum of four cores, which is KES 1,000 a month on the smaller plans: exactly the gap between the Linux S2 at KES 2,195 and WIN-S2 at KES 3,195.
The licence is not a second bill
Every Windows plan price carries a Windows Server Standard licence, provided under a Services Provider License Agreement and billed per active instance. Instances arrive activated — nothing to source, nothing to key in, nothing to renew, and nothing left to buy afterwards in a currency you had to convert into.
The version you choose moves the price by a knowable amount
Plan prices carry Windows Server 2022 Standard at KES 250 per vCPU per month. Windows Server 2019 Standard is KES 200 and 2025 Standard is KES 300, each on the same four-core minimum. The compute underneath is identical, so the version decision is a licence decision and you can see the size of it before you make it.
A larger ticket than the Linux equivalent
Because the licence rides along, a Windows plan is a bigger monthly figure — WIN-XXL is KES 36,870 a month — and an annual invoice is larger still. Bank transfer is the practical rail once the amount is more than a single mobile-money transaction will carry; M-Pesa and card cover the rest.
What's included
Everything on every plan
No feature tiers, no upsell traps. Each Windows VPS ships with the full stack — you only choose how much compute you need.
RDP access
Full Remote Desktop out of the box, ready the moment your instance boots.
Full administrator rights
Complete control of your Windows environment — install anything, configure everything.
NVMe SSD storage
Enterprise NVMe drives for fast boot, snappy databases, and low I/O latency.
Free DDoS protection
Always-on network-layer mitigation included on every plan at no extra cost.
Licensed & activated
Windows Server ships fully licensed and activated — nothing to bring or manage.
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.
Dedicated IPv4
A dedicated public IPv4 address included, with more available on demand.
60-second deploy
Provision a production-ready Windows instance in under a minute, every time.
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
Licensing, made simple
Licensed and activated. Nothing to bring.
The most common Windows hosting headache is licensing. We remove it entirely — every instance is legitimately licensed and ready to run from first boot.
- Windows Server licensing is included in every plan price — no separate license to buy.
- Instances ship pre-activated. There's nothing to key in and nothing to renew.
- Licensing is provided under a Services Provider License Agreement (SPLA) and billed per active instance.
- Choose Windows Server 2016, 2019, 2022, or 2025 at deploy time, and change versions on a fresh build.
License status
Windows Server 2025 Datacenter
Deep dive: Server 2019 · Server 2022 · Server 2025
Use cases
Built for the way you use Windows
.NET & ASP.NET hosting
Run IIS, ASP.NET, and full .NET workloads on a platform built for them — no compatibility layers.
SQL Server databases
Host Microsoft SQL Server with fast NVMe storage and the RAM headroom real workloads need.
Trading & forex terminals
Low-latency Windows desktops for MetaTrader and trading platforms, running 24/7 close to home.
Remote desktops for teams
Give your team a shared, always-on Windows environment they can reach securely over RDP.
How it works
Live in three steps
Choose region & plan
Pick Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, or Lagos, then the compute size that fits your workload.
Deploy in under 60 seconds
We provision a fully licensed, activated Windows Server instance — no setup steps for you.
Connect over RDP
Log in with Remote Desktop and full admin rights. Your environment is ready to use.
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
Data residency
The desktop is where the data actually piles up
On a stateless web server the personal data is in a database and you can point at it. On a Windows desktop it is everywhere: the file share, the spreadsheet somebody exported last month, the scanned ID in a Downloads folder, the accounting company file, the local copy taken before an upgrade. All of it sits on the volume, and on ke-1a the volume is in Nairobi.
Kenya's Data Protection Act, No. 24 of 2019, is administered by the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner, and it follows the data subject rather than the server — a controller outside Kenya processing personal data of people in Kenya is inside the Act. So hosting abroad is not an escape from it, and hosting in Nairobi is not compliance with it. What a Nairobi region gives you is location: the cross-border transfer conditions in sections 48 and 49 do not arise for data that never leaves the country.
Where Regulation 26 meets Windows software
Regulation 26 of the Data Protection (General) Regulations, 2021 requires processing through a server or data centre located in Kenya, or at least one serving copy held in one, for six named purposes — among them early childhood and basic education, and primary or secondary health care. School management systems and clinic packages are two of the categories of software that still ship for Windows only, so the legal requirement and the operating system land on the same buyer more often here than elsewhere. Most Windows workloads are nowhere near Regulation 26. If yours might be, check the specifics against your own obligations with your counsel.
What Lineserve supplies is location — data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act, with the instance and its volume held in Nairobi and not moved out of Kenya without your instruction. The desktop your team logs into, the files on it and the database behind the application all sit in one Kenyan city, under Kenyan law. Registration and compliance stay with you as the data controller.
Who runs here
What Kenyan teams put on a Windows desktop in Nairobi
Desktop accounting, payroll and ERP
A large part of Kenyan SME finance runs on packages that never had a Linux build and were designed for one machine in one office. Put the application on a Windows VPS and the accountant, the auditor and the branch bookkeeper open the same company file over RDP, instead of emailing versions of it to each other and reconciling the differences later.
SACCO and microfinance back offices
Core banking and member systems on Windows and SQL Server, month-end and dividend runs, and a back-office team that needs a session into the same environment from Nairobi, Nyeri or Kisumu. A hosted instance replaces the tower in the branch strongroom, along with its UPS and the person who restarts it.
The reporting side of a digital lender
Even where the customer-facing stack is Linux, the loan book, collections and reconciliation reporting often sit in Windows tools. Keeping them in Nairobi puts the back office in the same country as the production systems it reports on.
Line-of-business software for schools and clinics
School management systems, clinic and pharmacy packages and county administrative software are still largely Windows desktop products, bought by organisations with no server room and no one to run it. This is also the corner of the market where Regulation 26 is a live question rather than a theoretical one.
Agencies and ISVs shipping .NET
An IIS and .NET client site, a staging box and a Windows build agent are three instances on one account, billed in KES. Nairobi's agency and freelance channel is where most of this market's Windows work is actually delivered, and it buys the way it delivers: one instance at a time.
Trading terminals
MetaTrader and the other broker terminals are Windows desktops with full administrator rights, and they run here — but pick the region on the honest argument. A Nairobi server keeps a terminal up when your power and your laptop are not; it does nothing about the distance between your broker and its matching engine. Our Kenya forex VPS page sets out both halves of that.
Migrating
Moving in from abroad, or off the machine in the office
From an overseas Windows VPS
The usual arrangement is a monthly dollar charge on a card, a licence bundled at an exchange rate you did not choose, and a session that crosses an ocean twice. Moving to ke-1a changes the money and the path together: a KES figure you can budget against, and an RDP session that stays inside Kenya. You do not carry a licence with you, because the new instance already has one — so the move is installing the application on a fresh licensed instance and bringing the data across.
From the Windows server in your office
The tower in the back room in Westlands or on Mombasa Road has costs that never reach an invoice: the UPS and the person who resets it, the surge that took out a power supply in April, the office line that is the only route in, and the backup nobody has ever restored from. Hosting it turns those into a fixed KES line item with an SLA behind it. It also changes who can reach it — a branch or someone working from home gets the same session as the desk beside it, which the machine in the strongroom never allowed.
Ask us and your current supplier the same questions, and choose on the answers: whether the Windows licence is genuinely included and activated or something you are expected to bring, what the uptime commitment pays out when it is missed, where the machine physically sits, and what the invoice looks like when it arrives.
FAQ
Questions, answered
It's included. Every plan ships with a fully licensed, activated copy of Windows Server, provided under a Services Provider License Agreement and billed per active instance. There's nothing to bring or key in.
You can choose Windows Server 2016, 2019, 2022, or 2025 when you deploy. To move to a different version, spin up a fresh instance on the version you want.
Yes. You can resize to a larger plan as your workload grows, with minimal downtime. Storage and compute scale independently on the higher tiers.
Yes. Our plans are sized for SQL Server workloads, with fast NVMe storage and generous RAM. SQL Server licensing is handled separately from the base Windows license — talk to sales for a sized quote.
Yes. Our team assists with migrating existing Windows workloads into Lineserve at no extra charge. Reach out to support to plan the move.
Every plan includes at least one dedicated public IPv4 address. Higher tiers include additional addresses, and more are available on request.
Windows Server 2022 Standard is charged at KES 250 per vCPU per month on a minimum of four cores — KES 1,000 a month on the smaller plans. That is the whole difference between the Linux S2 at KES 2,195 and WIN-S2 at KES 3,195.
Yes, by the licence component and nothing else. Windows Server 2019 Standard is KES 200 per vCPU per month, 2022 Standard is KES 250 and 2025 Standard is KES 300, each charged on a minimum of four cores. The compute underneath is the same machine.
By bank transfer, which is the practical rail for the larger plans and for an annual invoice. M-Pesa and card are both supported for Kenyan customers, and everything is billed in KES either way.
Yes. The instance and its volume are in ke-1a, in Nairobi, so the file share, the exported spreadsheet, the company file and anything else sitting on the disk are held in Kenya and are not moved out of it without your instruction. That is data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act — a location, not a compliance certification.
Regulation 26 of the Data Protection (General) Regulations, 2021 requires processing through a server or data centre located in Kenya, or at least one serving copy held in one, for six named purposes — including early childhood and basic education and primary or secondary health care. ke-1a is in Nairobi. Whether your particular system falls inside one of those purposes is a question for your own counsel, not for us.
Yes, and traders do — but choose the region on uptime rather than on speed to your broker. Retail forex orders are matched in a small number of buildings in London and New York, and Nairobi is not one of them. Our forex VPS page makes that argument in full rather than hiding it.
Deploy your Windows VPS in under 60 seconds
Licensed, activated, and 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