About Lineserve in Nigeria
The Lagos region, and the company behind it
Trust in infrastructure is assembled from things a buyer can check. Where the machine is. Which country's law the records sit under. What currency the bill arrives in. What the uptime commitment pays when it is missed. In Nigeria the answers are short: your instances run in ng-1a, in Lagos; your data is held in Nigeria, which gives you data residency for Nigeria's Data Protection Act; you are quoted and invoiced in Naira. The company you contract with is LINESERVE, INC., which operates ng-1a alongside regions in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam — one account, one API and one bill across all three. Every sentence there can be tested from a laptop in Lagos before you spend anything.
Why we exist
The cloud was never built with us in mind
For years, running a serious application in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam or Lagos meant renting infrastructure somewhere else. Your servers sat an ocean away. Your users waited on every round trip. Your invoices arrived in a foreign currency, and your support requests joined a queue in a timezone that wasn't yours.
That's not a small inconvenience — it's a tax on everyone trying to build here. Higher latency, forex friction, and data that lives under someone else's jurisdiction. The global clouds treat this continent as a distant edge region, if they serve it at all.
Lineserve exists to invert that. We put the infrastructure where the users are, bill in the currency businesses actually use, keep data on the continent, and answer support in the hours people are awake. Not a foreign cloud with a local label — infrastructure that's genuinely, physically local.
The infrastructure
What “in Lagos” means, and why Lagos in particular
Lagos holds all three things a hosting decision depends on inside one metro. Nigeria's international capacity comes ashore here — eight subsea systems terminate in the country, among them SAT-3, WACS, ACE, Glo-1, Equiano and 2Africa, which lands at Lekki. The national internet exchange is here. And the customers are here. Elsewhere in the region capacity lands in a port city and is hauled hundreds of kilometres inland to the racks.
The exchange matters because of a problem Nigerian engineers know from experience: traffic between two Nigerian networks used to be carried to Europe and back, a packet crossing a few kilometres of Lagos taking a trip to London because the networks had nowhere domestic to meet. The Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria exists to close that gap — neutral and not-for-profit, founded in 2006 by the Nigerian Communications Commission with the ISP association, now running 13 points of presence across seven states with more than 130 connected networks.
Then the users, who in Nigeria are on a handset. The NCC counted 189.68 million active mobile subscriptions in May 2026, with MTN Nigeria on roughly 51% and Airtel Nigeria on roughly 35% — about 86% of Nigerian lines between them, and no version of a Nigerian audience avoids both. That is the argument for ng-1a: not a favoured-carrier arrangement, but an origin domestic to all of them at once.
What runs on top of the location is deliberately unlayered. Cloud servers and dedicated servers, S3-compatible object storage on the ng-1a.s3.lineserve.net endpoint, and colocation quoted per footprint — with NVMe storage, a dedicated IPv4 and a free /64 IPv6, always-on DDoS mitigation, snapshots and scheduled backups, private networking and a full API and CLI, behind a published 99.9% uptime SLA with service credits. There are no feature tiers to negotiate past.
189.68M
Active mobile subscriptions in Nigeria (NCC, May 2026)
8
Subsea cable systems landing in Nigeria
13
IXPN points of presence, across seven states
99.9%
Uptime SLA, with service credits
Settle it from a Lagos connection
Traceroute an ng-1a address from your own MTN, Airtel, Spectranet or ipNX connection and watch where the path terminates, then run it again from outside Nigeria and compare. Look the address up and see which networks announce it. Then put the same question to everything else you are quoted: which city is the machine in, and will the provider name it?
The clearest case for keeping traffic at home
On 14 March 2024, four cables serving West Africa — WACS, ACE, MainOne and SAT-3 — failed at once near Côte d'Ivoire. Thirteen countries were affected, Nigerian bank customers could not transact, and one operator declared force majeure with repairs put at up to eight weeks. An application hosted in Europe goes dark for its Nigerian users on a day like that. One hosted in Lagos is not asking the subsea path for permission.
What we believe
The principles behind the platform
Local-first, by design
Latency, billing, support, and data residency built for this region from the ground up — not bolted on to a foreign platform.
Global standards, no compromise
Tier III facilities, real redundancy, and open, standard tooling. Local doesn't mean lesser.
We only claim what we can back
No inflated badges, no borrowed logos, no fabricated numbers. If we say it, it's true and we can prove it.
No lock-in
S3-compatible storage, standard APIs, open images. Your stack is yours; you can leave whenever you want.
Sovereignty matters
Your data belongs on the continent, under jurisdiction you understand. We help keep it there.
On the ground
Real hardware, in real facilities, today
This isn't a roadmap. It's infrastructure that's live and serving production workloads across the region.
3 live regions
Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, and Lagos, with more zones in progress.
Tier III facilities
Carrier-neutral data centres with redundant power and cooling.
Enterprise hardware
Owned servers in-facility, not resold slivers of someone else's cloud.
A full stack
Cloud servers, dedicated servers, object storage, and colocation, from one provider.
99.9% uptime SLA
On every service, backed by service credits.
Local billing
KES, TZS, and NGN, with M-Pesa and local payment methods.
Leadership
Founder-led and engineering-first
Lineserve is built by engineers who use what they ship. The people making decisions about your infrastructure are the same people who rack the hardware, write the control plane, and answer the hard support tickets.
Talk to an engineer
Not a first-line script
- Kenya+254 119 039 063
- Tanzania+255 761 847 121
- Sales[email protected]
What's next
More regions, more of the stack, same principles
We're expanding zone by zone across the continent, deepening the platform with managed services, and holding to the same rule as day one: put the infrastructure where the users are, and only ship what's genuinely ready.
The company
Lineserve, formally
Plain factual details for credibility and due diligence — the kind of thing enterprise and public-sector buyers look for.
- Lineserve Cloud is operated by LINESERVE, INC., registered at 1111B S Governors Ave, STE 24432, Dover 19904, United States, together with its regional operating entities.
- Kenya: Lineserve Limited, a Kenyan-registered company and our Kenyan operating entity, at Utalii Lane, View Park Towers, Nairobi 00100. Registered for VAT in Kenya, and reachable on +254 119 039 063.
- Tanzania: the tz-1a region in Dar es Salaam, operated by LINESERVE, INC.. Billed in TZS, with a Tanzanian line on +255 761 847 121.
- Nigeria: the ng-1a region in Lagos, operated by LINESERVE, INC., billed in NGN.
- Registered contact: [email protected]
Build on infrastructure that's on your side
Local, standards-grade, and honest about what it can do. Start in minutes, or talk to the people who built it.
Currency, tax & invoicing
The Naira side of a Nigerian purchase
You are quoted in Naira and invoiced in Naira. The figure approved in one quarter is the figure that appears in the next, with no exchange-rate assumption buried underneath it and no argument at the year end about why an infrastructure line drifted. A cost that holds still is worth more than a discount that does not.
The tax regime changed materially on 1 January 2026. The Nigeria Tax Act 2025 and the Nigeria Tax Administration Act 2025 are in force, the Federal Inland Revenue Service is now the Nigeria Revenue Service, and the TIN sits at the centre of far more than it used to. VAT is 7.5% on cloud and hosting — worth noting if you are comparing markets, because Kenya charges 16% and Tanzania 18% on the same class of service. Prices exclude VAT.
One part of that change is already live. Mandatory e-invoicing is rolling out through the Nigeria Revenue Service, and large taxpayers — turnover of ₦5 billion and above — came under enforcement from 1 July 2026, with a 31 July 2026 compliance deadline. Inside that phase, a supplier document that will not reconcile into your electronic fiscal flow is a procurement problem before an accounting one.
Send the details before the first billing run
Your TIN, your registered name exactly as it is held, and any purchase-order reference, to [email protected]. Details supplied at the start appear on the document from the first run; details supplied in April become a reissue request. If the spend is approved annually, ask about annual billing in the same message — ten months for twelve, one approval, one payment.
Withholding, for the CFO who asks first
A Nigerian company paying an overseas supplier for services will want to know what it deducts, and its WHT agent files an electronic monthly schedule naming each supplier, the transaction, the amount withheld and the invoice number. That is a question for your own tax adviser — ask [email protected] for the supplier details that schedule needs, before the first payment run.
Prices exclude VAT. Colocation and larger dedicated deployments are quoted rather than sold from a price list — send the requirement to [email protected].
Data protection
Whose law your data sits under
Nigeria's Data Protection Act 2023 is the governing statute, and it established the Nigeria Data Protection Commission as the regulator. The General Application and Implementation Directive of 2025, effective from 19 September 2025, operationalises it — which means Nigerian data protection became an administered regime with filings attached. Buyers with compliance functions will ask where the data is held long before they ask what the CPU is.
The provision that decides where a Nigerian workload lives is section 41. Moving personal data out of Nigeria runs through named instruments — a destination law affording adequate protection, binding corporate rules, contractual clauses, a code of conduct or a certification mechanism — with the Commission able to issue adequacy decisions and standard contractual clauses of its own. Every one is work: to select, to paper, to keep current, and to explain to somebody else's auditor. Hold the data in ng-1a and it sits in Lagos, under Nigerian law, and that analysis has nothing to act on.
Above the general statute sits a sectoral layer sharper than anything in the neighbouring markets. On 15 June 2026 the Central Bank of Nigeria issued a circular directing that payment transaction data generated within Nigeria be stored and managed in Nigeria, with full compliance from 1 January 2027, reaching deposit money banks, microfinance banks, mobile money operators, fintechs, switching companies, payment service providers and super agents. For a licensed participant that turns the region question into a calendar entry.
Residency is what the region supplies
The location of the data is the input we provide. Registration with the Commission, your lawful basis, your notices, your impact assessments and whatever your own supervisor requires remain yours, wherever the disks spin. The honest version of that distinction is the one that survives a procurement questionnaire.
A second region is a decision, not a default
Nairobi and Dar es Salaam are one API call away and good places for a standby or a backup target. Make the call deliberately where personal data is involved: a copy of Nigerian personal data in ke-1a or tz-1a is a transfer out of Nigeria. Machine images, static assets and logs carrying no personal data raise none of it.
Who buys here
Why Nigerian teams put the region in Nigeria
Almost nobody chooses a region for its own sake. Each of these segments arrived at Lagos through a different door, and the door is usually more interesting than the destination.
Payments and fintech
The largest startup category in the country, and the one with a deadline on the calendar. The CBN's June 2026 circular gives licensed payments participants until 1 January 2027 to have Nigeria-generated transaction data stored and managed in Nigeria — and ledgers, reconciliation stores, webhook receivers and KYC records are exactly the data it describes.
Betting and gaming
One of Nigeria's largest online sectors and one of the burstiest workloads anywhere: bet placement at kickoff is felt by the customer directly, so the round trip is a product feature rather than an engineering detail. Since the Supreme Court ruling of November 2024 the states set the terms, which means per-state reporting from systems that had better be auditable in-country.
E-commerce and retail
Nigerian online retail runs a pronounced October-to-December peak across Black Friday and the festive season; one operator moved 5.6 million packages in a single Black Friday campaign. Checkout is where distance is felt most — a sequence of round trips at the moment a customer decides whether to hand over money.
Media, streaming and publishing
Nigeria produces a great deal of what Nigeria watches and listens to, and media workloads are origin storage plus egress. Every megabyte served from Lagos is one that did not cross a subsea cable to reach a Nigerian viewer, and object storage runs on a per-region endpoint, so the catalogue and the application sit in the same city.
Agencies, ISVs and ISPs
Lagos has a dense agency and software market reselling hosting into Nigerian SMEs, and a licensed ISP segment — Spectranet, Starlink, FiberOne, ipNX, Tizeti — that buys capacity as well as selling it. They care about Naira cost per client, and about naming the city when a client asks.
Due diligence
How to check all of this before you spend anything
Check the infrastructure
Run the tests before the money moves. Traceroute an ng-1a address from a Nigerian connection and see where the path terminates, then repeat from outside the country and compare. Read status.lineserve.net for what has actually happened in the region rather than what is promised about it. Ask what the 99.9% SLA pays out when it is missed and who claims it — then put the same questions to whatever you are comparing against.
Check the commercial side
LINESERVE, INC. is the entity you contract with, ng-1a is the region you buy, and Naira is the currency both ends of that arrangement speak. Ask for a sample invoice before you order and hand it to whoever files your returns, and for the SLA terms and credit-claim process in writing while you are still choosing. If your procurement pack has a supplier questionnaire, send it early — those answers are worth more on your own paper than on ours.
All of that is an afternoon of work, and it is the cheapest afternoon in the project. [email protected] for anything this page has not answered.
FAQ
Questions, answered
LINESERVE, INC. — the company that operates ng-1a in Lagos, along with ke-1a in Nairobi and tz-1a in Dar es Salaam. Your servers are in Lagos, your billing is in Naira, and [email protected] is the commercial address.
In ng-1a, in Lagos: compute, storage and the region's network endpoint are all in the city, and an instance stays there unless you move it. Three regions are live — Lagos, Nairobi and Dar es Salaam — on one account, one API and one bill, with the residency caveat below when personal data about Nigerians is involved.
NGN, by card or bank transfer. Prices can be viewed in four currencies, but a Nigerian customer is quoted and invoiced in Naira, so the figure approved is the figure billed. Transfer is how most Nigerian business payments settle; ask [email protected] for the details before your payment run.
Nigeria's VAT rate is 7.5% on cloud and hosting services, administered by the Nigeria Revenue Service, and displayed prices exclude it. Send any requirement your finance team has for the document to [email protected] before you order.
Yes. Data in ng-1a is held in Lagos and is not moved out of the country without your instruction, which gives you data residency for Nigeria's Data Protection Act. A copy you make in ke-1a or tz-1a is a transfer out of Nigeria, and section 41 applies to it.
It settles one input — where the personal data physically lives — and keeps the section 41 cross-border analysis out of your architecture. Everything else stays yours as controller: registration with the Commission where you are in scope, your lawful basis, your notices and your breach handling.
The circular of 15 June 2026 directs that payment transaction data generated within Nigeria be stored and managed in Nigeria from 1 January 2027, across banks, mobile money operators, fintechs, switching companies, payment service providers and super agents. A Lagos region supplies the location; how your own systems and retention map onto the circular is a question for your compliance function and your counsel.
Check status.lineserve.net first: anything affecting a whole region is posted there before a reply could reach you. Open a ticket signed in, so it arrives with your account, region and instance attached. Meanwhile the fastest fixes need nobody at all — restore a snapshot, roll back to a scheduled backup, or use the browser console when SSH is what has broken. The commitment behind all of it is a 99.9% uptime SLA with service credits; ask [email protected] for the terms and the claim process in writing before you order.
[email protected] before the order; [email protected] for invoices and payments; [email protected] for reselling and technology partnerships; [email protected] and [email protected] for anything urgent about the network. Nigeria is on West Africa Time, UTC+1, with no daylight saving.