Linux VPS in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam or Lagos
Linux VPS Hosting in Kenya, Tanzania and Nigeria
Full root, in the country your users are in.
Ubuntu, Debian, Rocky, AlmaLinux, CentOS Stream or Fedora on NVMe-backed storage, with your SSH key loaded and cloud-init finished before you open a terminal. You choose the region at deploy time — ke-1a in Nairobi, tz-1a in Dar es Salaam, ng-1a in Lagos — and every plan carries full root, a dedicated IPv4 and a free /64 of IPv6. From $21.95 a month, with no licence component in the price, quoted and settled in US dollars by card or bank transfer.
- Full root and SSH keys on every plan, in any of the three regions
- Six distributions, cloud-init ready, or bring your own ISO
- Quoted and settled in USD by card or bank transfer
- Your data is held in the country you deploy it in
- 99.9% uptime SLA · free DDoS protection · full API and CLI
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 half of the request a CDN was never going to serve
Most teams reach for an edge network first, and they are right to. Then the numbers stay stubborn, because a cache serves bytes that have already been computed and the requests users actually wait on are the ones that have not: the logged-in dashboard, the search query, the cart write, the API response, the webhook you have thirty seconds to acknowledge. Every one of those goes home. If home is Frankfurt or northern Virginia and the user is in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam or Lagos, it goes home across an ocean and comes back the same way. Put the origin in the country and the cache in front of it, and each does the job it is good at.
The audience on the other end of that path is overwhelmingly mobile, at a scale worth designing around. Kenya's regulator counted 84.09 million active SIMs and 52.85 million mobile broadband subscriptions in the quarter to March 2026. Tanzania's counted 111.9 million subscriptions with mobile wireless at roughly 99% of all internet connections, smartphone penetration at 42.5% and 4G covering 94.2% of the population. Nigeria's counted 189.68 million active mobile lines, with MTN and Airtel carrying about 86% of them. The person waiting on your login screen is on a mid-range Android on a cell, and the last mile is not yours to fix. The first byte is.
The part above the last mile has improved a great deal, unevenly between the three. Nairobi exchanges domestic traffic at KIXP, running since February 2002 with 136 peer networks and 2.9 Tbps of connected capacity on PeeringDB, and ke-1a peers there. Dar es Salaam has TIX, listed at 32 networks and 798G, with SEACOM, EASSy and SEAS landing in the city itself. Lagos has IXPN, 13 points of presence across seven states and more than 130 connected networks, carrying peak domestic traffic that went from 1 Tbps in April 2025 to 2 Tbps by March 2026. What that shared trajectory means for an origin is simple: traffic between your instance and a domestic network stays domestic, instead of being hauled to Europe for a journey of a few kilometres.
There is a resilience argument underneath the performance one, and it has a date on it. On 14 March 2024 four subsea systems failed near Côte d'Ivoire on the same day; thirteen countries were disrupted and Nigerian bank customers could not transact. An application in Europe is unreachable to its West African users in that scenario, because every request crosses the break. An application in Lagos serving Nigerian users over Nigerian networks never puts the cable in the path at all.
3
Regions — Nairobi (ke-1a), Dar es Salaam (tz-1a), Lagos (ng-1a)
84.1M
Active SIMs in Kenya (CA, Q1 2026)
111.9M
Telecom subscriptions in Tanzania (TCRA, Q1 2026)
189.68M
Active mobile lines in Nigeria (NCC, May 2026)
The in-country tier, in practice
The common shape is not a migration. It is application servers and a read replica in the region, the control plane left wherever it already runs, a tunnel between them, and DNS routing each user to the nearer origin. Session state and search indexes follow the users; the analytics warehouse and the CI fleet stay put.
Where the edge is not
The published edge locations of the large content networks include Nairobi, Lagos and Mombasa. Tanzania has none, so a Dar es Salaam viewer is served from another country however the CDN is configured. That makes tz-1a the region where an in-country origin changes the most for static assets as well as dynamic ones.
Payments
Dollars, and the option of not using them
You are quoted, invoiced and settled in US dollars by card or bank transfer, from a dollar price list rather than a conversion applied at checkout. Developers and agencies buy in a particular way — one instance at a time, a staging box here, a client site there — and the account is built for that: instances go on and come off, and they arrive on one invoice at the end of the month.
Card
Visa and Mastercard, charged in USD. The right rail for a single 2 GB plan at $21.95 you want running in the next ten minutes, and for the monthly renewals that follow it.
Bank transfer
For anything with a purchase order behind it: a fleet across two regions, a 32 GB plan at $328.70 a month, or a year taken up front at ten months for twelve. It arrives with a reference your accounts team can match against the invoice.
Or bill the local entity locally
If the cost belongs to a Kenyan or Tanzanian subsidiary rather than to head office, switch to that market and it settles in shillings, with M-Pesa alongside bank transfer and card. Nigeria settles in Naira by bank transfer or card. Each price list is set per currency rather than converted.
One account, several client environments
Agencies usually want one login, one API token and one invoice across a set of client instances that live in different countries. That is the default rather than an arrangement to negotiate — the region is a field on the instance, not a separate contract.
Annual billing is ten months for twelve on eligible plans. Displayed prices exclude tax; where VAT applies it is calculated and shown separately at checkout.
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, Dar es Salaam or Lagos — and what decides it
The rule is unglamorous and it holds nearly everywhere: put the workload in the country whose users and whose records it serves. Per-unit prices are identical in all three regions, so the decision is geography and law rather than cost — and there is no useful midpoint, because traffic between the three cities is still commonly carried through Europe.
ke-1a is for Kenyan users and Kenyan records, and for regional teams whose head office is already in Nairobi. Every Kenyan subsea cable — TEAMS, SEACOM, EASSy, LION2, DARE1 and PEACE — comes ashore at Mombasa, and that capacity is carried roughly 480 km inland to the city where the carriers and the customers are. Domestic traffic never makes that trip: it is exchanged inside Nairobi at KIXP, the neutral exchange TESPOK has run since 2002, with 136 peer networks and 2.9 Tbps of connected capacity. Lineserve peers there.
tz-1a is for Tanzanian users, and it is where moving an origin changes the most: Tanzania has no content-delivery edge of its own, so a Dar es Salaam viewer is served from another country however the CDN is configured. There is no inland haul either — SEACOM, EASSy and SEAS come ashore in the city itself, and Dar es Salaam is a named landing point on 2Africa. Tanzanian networks meet at TIX, run since 2003 by the country's service-provider association, and 13,820 km of state fibre carries one origin on to Mwanza, Arusha and Dodoma.
ng-1a is for scale and for regulated Nigerian workloads. Eight subsea systems land in and around Lagos, among them MainOne, SAT-3, WACS, Equiano and 2Africa, which comes ashore at Lekki. Nigerian networks exchange domestic traffic at IXPN, founded in 2006 to stop domestic packets being hauled to London and now running 13 points of presence across seven states. Lagos also has a date attached: a Central Bank circular directs payment transaction data generated in Nigeria to be stored there from 1 January 2027.
All three give a buyer based elsewhere the same pair of things: a request from a user in the city reaches a machine in that city, typically in single-digit milliseconds, and the records it touches sit under one named country's law.
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%
- Service credits applied automatically when we miss the SLA
- Measured monthly, per region, on network and power availability
- Tier III colocation facilities across all live regions
Support
You are on a different continent from your infrastructure
That is the real reservation, and it is answerable with what exists. Architecture, quotes, contracts, a data processing agreement, the registered names and tax identifiers that have to appear on your invoices: [email protected], in writing, in a thread you can forward to your own legal and finance people. Running services are driven from the console, the API and the ticket system on your account. Two phone lines are published for the region — +254 119 039 063 in Kenya and +255 761 847 121 in Tanzania.
Scheduling across the distance is the practical problem, and the arithmetic is friendlier than it looks. Nairobi and Dar es Salaam run on East Africa Time, UTC+3; Lagos on West Africa Time, UTC+1. Neither observes daylight saving, so the gap between your clock and theirs moves only when your own clocks change, and a window agreed in June still means what you thought it meant in December. From London, Nairobi is three hours ahead in winter and two in summer, and Lagos an hour ahead in winter and level in summer. From New York in July, a 09:00 call is 14:00 in Lagos.
Most of what would be a phone call elsewhere is a call you make yourself. Building, resizing, rebooting, snapshotting and rebuilding an instance are API and console operations that behave identically at three in the morning your time or theirs, and a browser console reaches a machine that has lost its own networking. What needs a person in the building is a physical fault — and that person is there already.
Why Lineserve
Decided on what actually matters here
Cost & invoicing
What a per-country tier actually costs to run
In-country tiers get postponed on a suspicion that they will be expensive, and the arithmetic rarely supports it. A 2 GB plan at $21.95 a month runs a staging environment, a small API or a client's brochure site. A 4 GB plan at $42.40 runs a WordPress or Laravel application with its database beside it. An 8 GB plan at $83.30 is where a production web tier with a read replica normally lands, and a 16 GB plan at $165.10 covers a busy one. Adding a second country is that figure again, not a multiple of your global bill — and cloud servers, priced from $13.89 by the vCPU, GB of RAM and GB of storage you specify, exist for the cases where a fixed plan is the wrong shape.
Storage is the other line that moves, and it moves in your favour. S3-compatible object storage is $0.061 per GB a month and $0.035 at scale, with transfer in, transfer out and API requests all free — so media derivatives, backups and static assets served from the same region as the origin carry no egress meter. Managed Kubernetes starts at $27.86 a month for a Basic control plane and $116.34 for a fault-tolerant one, in the same regions and on the same invoice.
Tax follows where you buy from and which market bills you, not which region the instance runs in. Buying internationally you are invoiced in dollars; displayed prices exclude tax, and where VAT applies it is calculated and shown separately at checkout. If a local subsidiary is the buyer instead, the domestic rate applies — 16% in Kenya, 18% on the Tanzanian mainland, 7.5% in Nigeria — along with that country's invoicing mechanics, which is a conversation worth having before the order rather than at the year end.
Send the details once
Registered names, tax identifiers and any purchase-order or cost-centre reference go to [email protected] before the first order, and the billing account carries them from the first run. If you need separate accounts per country or per client, say so at the same time — it is a setup decision rather than something to unpick later.
Prices exclude VAT. Annual billing runs ten months for twelve on eligible plans.
Data residency
On a Linux box, personal data is never only in the database
Kenya's Data Protection Act 2019, Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act 2022 and Nigeria's Data Protection Act 2023 all attach conditions to moving personal data out of the country, and they are not equally strict. Kenya permits a transfer on proof of appropriate safeguards, with Regulation 26 requiring at least one serving copy inside Kenya for six named purposes including basic education and primary or secondary health care. Nigeria's section 41 permits transfer where the recipient is covered by an adequate law, binding corporate rules, contractual clauses or a certification mechanism. Tanzania requires a permit from its Commission before the data leaves — prior authorisation, which finishes when a regulator says so rather than when you do.
Translate that onto a running server and it stops being a policy document. It is the Postgres primary and its replica, the uploads directory, the logs with IP addresses and phone numbers in every line, the CSV somebody exported for a report and left in /tmp, the nightly dump on the second volume, the search index, the queue holding a payload for ninety seconds. None of that appears on a data map, and all of it is personal data. Your instance is created in the region you chose and stays there, which puts the unmapped half of the system inside the country along with the mapped half.
Nigeria adds a sectoral obligation with a date on it. A Central Bank circular of 15 June 2026 directs that payment transaction data generated within Nigeria be stored and managed in Nigeria, with full compliance from 1 January 2027, naming banks, mobile money operators, fintechs, switching companies and payment service providers. For anyone building payments infrastructure into that market, the region field on the instance stopped being an architecture preference in the middle of last year.
And there is a mirror international teams find late. Kenya's Act reaches a controller not established or ordinarily resident in Kenya who processes the personal data of people located in Kenya. A company in Berlin or Boston with Kenyan users sits inside that Act whatever country its servers stand in. Hosting abroad moves the machine, not the obligation.
Replication between regions is a transfer
The three regions share one account and one API, which makes a standby in another country trivially easy — and that is exactly why it deserves a decision rather than a default. A copy of Tanzanian personal data in Lagos is a transfer out of Tanzania under the permit regime. Machine images, package mirrors, static assets and telemetry stripped of personal data raise no such question.
Data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act, Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act or Nigeria's Data Protection Act, depending on the region. Your own registration and compliance obligations as a controller remain yours.
Who runs here
The Linux workloads international teams put in-country
The regional tier of a global SaaS
Application servers, a read replica and a cache in the country, the control plane left in Frankfurt or Virginia, DNS sending each user to the nearer origin. This is the shape most expansions actually take, and it is a configuration rather than a migration: an 8 GB plan at $83.30 alongside what you already run, not instead of it.
Origin servers behind a CDN
Keep the edge for the audience you have everywhere else and move the origin to where the uncached requests are answered. Media derivatives, manifest and segment origins, and image pipelines pair with S3-compatible object storage at $0.061 per GB, where transfer in, transfer out and API requests are free.
Agencies, integrators and software vendors
One buyer, many client environments, and increasingly a tender that specifies which country the data is held in. Multi-tenant client hosting, staging environments, Git-based deploys, and an in-country IP so client sites resolve locally.
Payments and fintech services
API endpoints and webhook receivers taking callbacks that originate inside the country, ledger and reconciliation databases, KYC document stores, fraud scoring, and audit archives that grow and never shrink. Every one of them is a Linux service, and in Nigeria the question of which building they run in now has a deadline attached.
Field data for development programmes
DHIS2 and other health and monitoring platforms, KoboToolbox and ODK form servers taking submissions over mobile data from teams days away from a city, file sync, and grant-reporting dashboards. Donor audits ask where the data sits; country offices ask why the survey server is slow. A 4 GB plan at $42.40 usually answers both.
Control panels and the long tail of client sites
CyberPanel, Plesk or whatever your team already runs, installed on a machine you own rather than rented as somebody else's shared account. Full root means the PHP or Python version is yours, the cron actually fires, the queue worker survives a deploy, and Redis sits next to the database instead of across a network.
Linux VPS from $21.95/month; cloud servers built to your own spec from $13.89; object storage from $0.061 per GB; managed Kubernetes from $27.86; dedicated LineServe Core hardware from $309 plus a one-time $99 setup.
Getting here
Add the region, or move the origin
Alongside the cloud you already run
Nothing has to leave AWS, Google Cloud or Azure. Build the instance in ke-1a, tz-1a or ng-1a, bring up a tunnel to your existing VPC, replicate the data that has to be in-country, and point that country's traffic at the new origin with a DNS record. Your pipelines, your images and your monitoring carry on as they are; what changes is that one tier of the application now answers from inside the country your customer or their regulator asked about. The second and third countries are the same afternoon's work with a different region code.
From a per-country host you inherited
Expansion often leaves an estate behind it: a reseller account somebody bought for one client site, a machine in a partner's rack, a control panel whose login is in a former colleague's mailbox. The move itself is routine — rsync the document root, dump and restore the database, run both for a day, drop the TTL and cut the DNS over. What you gain is the layer underneath: an API and CLI rather than a panel, snapshots and scheduled backups, private networking, live resize to 32 vCPU and 64 GB, and the other two countries already on the same account when you need them.
Migration planning and assistance are included at no extra charge. Tell [email protected] what you run and where, and the reply is an architecture rather than a quote.
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.
The one whose users and records the workload serves — Kenyan in ke-1a, Tanzanian in tz-1a, Nigerian in ng-1a. Per-unit prices are identical in all three, so the choice is geography and law rather than cost. Serving two of the three means two instances; there is no useful midpoint between the cities.
Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS Stream, Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux and Fedora, all kept current and chosen at deploy time, or a custom ISO you upload. The images cost nothing and there is no licence component in the price. Changing distribution means a fresh instance rather than an in-place switch.
Yes, on every plan including the smallest. SSH key or password authentication, cloud-init on first boot, and a browser console as a fallback for the evening you lock yourself out of SSH.
Yes, and you usually should if part of your audience is elsewhere. A CDN caches what has already been computed; the origin computes the rest. Moving the origin into the country is the part no cache configuration does for you.
A full API and CLI cover instances, snapshots, private networking and IP allocation, and the region is a parameter on the call rather than a separate endpoint or a separate account. One token covers Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and Lagos.
Yes, on one console, one API and one invoice. Where personal data is copied between regions, treat it as a cross-border transfer under the origin country's law — Tanzania in particular requires a permit before personal data leaves — and settle that before you schedule the replication.
From $21.95 a month for 1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM and 40 GB, through $42.40, $83.30, $165.10 and $328.70, to $655.90 for 32 vCPU and 64 GB. You are quoted, invoiced and settled in USD by card or bank transfer by default; switching to the Kenya, Tanzania or Nigeria market changes the currency to KES, TZS or NGN. Prices exclude VAT, and annual billing is ten months for twelve.
Yes. vCPU, RAM and storage each resize independently up to 32 vCPU and 64 GB of RAM, with minimal downtime and without changing the IP address.
Yes. The instance, its volume and everything on it are created in that region's city and are not moved out of the country without your instruction — data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act, Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act or Nigeria's Data Protection Act.
No. The account is yours wherever you are and the region is a choice at deploy time. You contract with LINESERVE, INC., registered in Dover, Delaware; what is in the three countries is the infrastructure.
NVMe-backed storage, a 1 Gbps port with unlimited local traffic, one dedicated IPv4 and a free /64 of IPv6, always-on DDoS mitigation, on-demand snapshots and scheduled backups, private networking between your instances, a browser console, and a full API and CLI. There are no feature tiers.
That path is intercontinental and always will be — comfortable for a shell, a deploy pipeline or a package pull, and not the reason the region exists. The region exists for your users in these cities, whose in-metro round trips are typically single-digit milliseconds.
That is a different page and a different machine: a licensed, pre-activated Windows Server image with RDP and full administrator rights, for the ERP, the SQL Server database or the .NET application with no Linux build. The licence sits inside the plan price.
Customer references are available under NDA. Tell [email protected] what you are building and which country it is for.
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