ng-1a — Lagos
Where your data lives in Nigeria
ng-1a is a Lagos region — compute, storage and the network endpoint all inside the city where Nigeria's subsea systems come ashore and where the national internet exchange sits. Nothing between a Nigerian user and your application has to leave the country to get there, and your records sit under Nigerian law rather than someone else's. Nairobi and Dar es Salaam are on the same account when you want a copy somewhere else.
3
live regions
Tier III
facilities
Carrier-neutral
connectivity
<6 ms
latency within each metro
The footprint
Three metros, on the ground today
Each region is a physically distinct facility with its own power, cooling, connectivity, and network endpoint. Choose where your workloads and data live.
Lagos
Nigeria · ng-1a
~4 ms
typical, within metro
in-country region
Nairobi
Kenya · ke-1a
~2 ms
typical, within metro
in-country region
Dar es Salaam
Tanzania · tz-1a
~6 ms
typical, within metro
in-country region
Network
Nigeria's internet has a shape. This is where ng-1a sits in it.
Begin with the coast, because Lagos is the coast. Eight subsea systems land in Nigeria — SAT-3, WACS, ACE, Glo-1, MainOne, Equiano, 2Africa and the Nigeria Cameroon Submarine Cable System — coming ashore in and around Lagos, with 2Africa landing at Lekki. That makes Lagos the densest cable landing point in West Africa, and something rarer: a city where the international capacity, the interconnection and the customers sit in one metro. In Kenya the capacity lands at Mombasa and is hauled roughly 480 km inland to a rack in Nairobi. In Nigeria there is no inland haul.
Landings are only half the geography, and the other half decides how a Nigerian application actually feels. For years, two Nigerian networks with no domestic place to meet exchanged their traffic in Europe, so a packet crossing a few kilometres of Lagos took a trip to London and back. The Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria was founded in 2006 by the Nigerian Communications Commission with the Internet Service Providers Association of Nigeria to close exactly that gap. It is neutral and not-for-profit, and it now operates 13 points of presence across seven states with more than 130 connected networks on around 170 ports. The work is not finished either: traffic between two West African cities still frequently routes through Europe, the same problem one continent up.
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% between them. The licensed fixed and wireless ISP segment is far smaller: 352,006 active subscriptions at the end of 2025, of which Spectranet held 108,525, Starlink 91,991 and FiberOne 44,413. Those are licensed-ISP subscriptions rather than Nigerian internet users, and the gap between the two numbers is the whole story of how this country connects.
8
Subsea cable systems landing in Nigeria
13
IXPN points of presence, across seven states
130+
Networks connected at IXPN
189.68M
Active mobile subscriptions (NCC, May 2026)
Why a local exchange matters, in plain terms
Two networks that meet at an exchange hand traffic straight to each other there, instead of paying an international carrier to take it out of the country and back. It removes an intercontinental round trip from a path that had no business taking one, and stops networks paying international transit rates to reach the building next door.
The gap on the map
No global cloud provider runs a full region in Nigeria. What the large providers operate in Lagos are edge and content points of presence — useful for cached objects, and not the same thing as a region you can put a database in. The nearest full regions sit in southern Africa, so Nigerian data held with a global provider is generally held outside Nigeria. That is a factual position rather than a criticism: those are excellent platforms which are not in this country.
The four-cable day
On 14 March 2024, WACS, ACE, MainOne and SAT-3 failed at once near Côte d'Ivoire. Connectivity degraded across thirteen countries, Nigerian bank customers could not transact, and one operator declared force majeure with repairs estimated 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, serving Nigerian users over Nigerian networks, is not asking the subsea path for permission.
Facility detail
Inside our regions
Three regions, each in the country it serves. Where each one sits on its national network is what decides how it behaves. Certifications and standards below belong to the facility operator; Lineserve operates within these carrier-neutral, Tier III facilities.
Lagos (ng-1a)
Location
Lagos, Nigeria
Facility
Tier III, carrier-neutral
International capacity
Nigeria's international capacity comes ashore at Lagos, which is where the country's subsea systems terminate.
Local exchange
IXPN, the Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria, sits in Lagos and keeps traffic between Nigerian networks inside the country.
Data residency
Your data is held in Nigeria, giving you data residency for Nigeria's Data Protection Act (NDPA).
Storage endpoint
ng-1a.s3.lineserve.net
Nairobi (ke-1a)
Location
Nairobi, Kenya
Facility
Tier III, carrier-neutral
International capacity
Kenya's international capacity comes ashore at Mombasa and is backhauled roughly 480 km inland to Nairobi.
Local exchange
KIXP, operated by TESPOK across four Nairobi facilities, carries 136 peer networks and 2.9 Tbps of capacity. Lineserve peers there, so traffic to another network on the exchange is handed over inside Nairobi.
Data residency
Your data is held in Kenya, giving you data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act.
Storage endpoint
ke-1a.s3.lineserve.net
Dar es Salaam (tz-1a)
Location
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
Facility
Tier III, carrier-neutral
International capacity
Tanzania's international capacity comes ashore at Dar es Salaam, and the national backbone reaches inland from there.
Local exchange
TIX, the Tanzania Internet Exchange, sits in Dar es Salaam and is where Tanzanian networks hand traffic to each other rather than routing it abroad.
Data residency
Your data is held in Tanzania, giving you data residency for Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act.
Storage endpoint
tz-1a.s3.lineserve.net
Built for uptime
The standards behind every region
Our regions operate in facilities engineered for continuous availability — the layers that are expensive and slow to build, already in place.
Tier III facilities
Concurrently maintainable power and cooling, so maintenance never means downtime.
Redundant power
Dual A+B feeds, UPS protection, and generator backup to ride through grid faults.
Resilient cooling
N+1 precision cooling with containment to hold temperature under full load.
Physical security
Access control, CCTV, and staffed, audited entry to every space.
Fire detection & suppression
Early-warning detection and suppression systems protecting the floor.
24/7 monitoring
Power, environmental, and network monitoring around the clock, with on-site response.
Connectivity
Carrier-neutral, close to the cables
Our facilities are carrier-neutral, so you're never locked to a single network. Blended local IP transit keeps latency low and traffic on the continent, with cross-connects to the carriers and peers you need.
Carrier-neutral
Choose among multiple upstreams and peers within the facility.
Local IP transit
Blended, low-latency transit from regional providers, with room to scale.
Subsea cable access
Each region sits where its country's international capacity comes ashore — Mombasa for Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, and Lagos.
Cross-connects & peering
Direct links to carriers, IXPs, and your own cabinets.
Sovereignty
Your data stays on the continent
For regulated, sensitive, or public-sector workloads, jurisdiction matters. Because our facilities are physically in-region, your data can stay in the country you choose — under laws you understand, close to the users it serves.
Talk to Sales about data residencyWhat's next
More regions, zone by zone
We're extending the footprint across the continent, placing infrastructure closer to more users. These zones are in progress.
Put your workloads where your users are
Tier III facilities, redundant everything, and data that stays in-country — with local billing and support.
99.9% uptime SLA · Carrier-neutral · Data stays in-country
Data residency
Choosing a region is choosing a legal system
Round trips are the reason most people give for hosting in Lagos. Jurisdiction is the reason the decision is hard to reverse. Nigeria's Data Protection Act 2023 is the governing statute and the Nigeria Data Protection Commission administers it, with the General Application and Implementation Directive of 2025 — effective 19 September 2025 — turning the Act into an operating regime with registration and filing attached. That obligation follows the data subjects, not the disks: moving a server abroad moves the hardware and leaves the duty where it was.
What region choice does change is how much sits between you and an ordinary operation. Section 41 puts moving personal data out of Nigeria onto 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. Each is something to choose, paper, maintain and defend. Hold the data in ng-1a and none of it has anything to act on, because no record has crossed a border — and the answer to “where is our customer data” is the name of a city your regulator can reach.
The payments layer has a date on it
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 converts region choice from an architectural preference into a dated obligation.
Registration is about you, not the building
What ng-1a supplies is location: your data held in Lagos, under Nigerian law, and not moved out of the country without your instruction. Registration with the Commission where you are in scope, your lawful basis, your notices and your breach handling remain yours wherever you host — and that distinction is the first thing a competent procurement reviewer will test.
Copying personal data about Nigerians into ke-1a or tz-1a is a transfer out of Nigeria and belongs in the section 41 conversation above. Machine images, static assets and logs carrying no personal data raise none of it.
Who chooses a region on purpose
The workloads that decide the region before anything else
For plenty of applications the region is a shrug. For these it is the first constraint, and everything else was fitted around it.
Payment infrastructure
Ledgers, reconciliation stores, webhook receivers taking interbank transfer callbacks, KYC services, fraud scoring, and audit archives kept for years. The traffic originates in Nigeria, the supervisor is Nigerian, and the CBN circular of June 2026 puts a 1 January 2027 date on where the transaction data is held.
Real-time betting and gaming backends
Odds ingestion, bet placement APIs that see their entire day's peak in the ninety seconds around a kickoff, live settlement, and terminal backends serving thousands of agents. Burst behaviour is felt by the customer directly, and since regulation devolved to the states in November 2024 the reporting is per-state as well.
ISPs, WISPs and network operators
RADIUS and AAA, resolvers and authoritative zones, mail relays, billing and provisioning portals, NetFlow collectors, monitoring stacks, looking glass, IPAM. Every one is a service to Nigerian networks measured by Nigerian users, which makes hosting them anywhere else actively worse.
Media origins and object storage
Media is origin storage plus egress. Serving a catalogue from Lagos means the bytes never cross a subsea cable to reach a Nigerian viewer, and a cache in front of a Lagos origin fills from next door rather than another continent. Object storage runs on ng-1a.s3.lineserve.net, so the bucket and the application sit in the same city.
Systems with a national date attached
Exam-preparation platforms on a JAMB window, retail through Black Friday and December, election and results traffic, tax and filing deadlines. These are hard, predictable national peaks arriving over Nigerian networks all at once. Size for the ordinary week, resize for the date, and rehearse the resize first.
Anything replacing a server in the office
Nigeria's grid collapsed in December 2025 and again in January 2026, and NERC's January 2026 factsheet put average available generation near 4,901 MW against far more demand. A machine in your own building is kept alive with a generator, an inverter and a fuel account that moves with the diesel price. In a region that becomes a fixed Naira line item with a 99.9% SLA behind it.
Choosing
How to check where a server actually is
From a region that is not in Nigeria
The move is routine work: provision, sync, dump and restore the database, run both in parallel for a day, cut the DNS. What changes afterwards is the shape of every request a Nigerian user makes — the path stops leaving the country and coming back. The commercial side changes with it: quoted and invoiced in Naira, so the figure approved in one quarter is the figure billed in the next.
From a Nigeria-branded product served elsewhere
A number of products marketed for this country are delivered from Europe or southern Africa with a Nigerian name on the front. That is a legitimate way to sell hosting, and it is your job to know which one you have bought, because it decides how far your customers' packets travel and which country's law your records sit under. One question settles it: which city is the machine in, and is the provider willing to name it? For a Lineserve instance the answer is ng-1a, Lagos.
You can check any of this yourself in a minute. Traceroute from a Nigerian connection and watch where the path terminates, then run it again from outside the country and compare. Then ask what the uptime SLA pays out when it is missed, and who has to claim it.
FAQ
Questions, answered
In Lagos: compute, storage and the region's network endpoint are all in the city, and an instance stays there unless you move it. Traceroute to it from a Nigerian connection and watch where the path ends, then repeat from outside the country and compare. Look the address up and see which networks announce it — and put the same test to anything else you are quoted.
Eight systems: SAT-3, WACS, ACE, Glo-1, MainOne, Equiano, 2Africa and the Nigeria Cameroon Submarine Cable System, coming ashore in and around Lagos, with 2Africa landing at Lekki. Lagos is the densest landing point in West Africa, which is why the international capacity and the region sit in the same city.
The country's neutral, not-for-profit national exchange, founded in 2006 by the Nigerian Communications Commission with the Internet Service Providers Association of Nigeria. It runs 13 points of presence across seven states, with more than 130 connected networks on around 170 ports. Its purpose is to let Nigerian networks hand traffic to each other inside Nigeria rather than routing it through Europe — which is what used to happen, and still happens to much intra-African traffic.
No. The large global providers operate edge and content points of presence in Lagos, which serve cached objects, but no full cloud region — the nearest of those sit in southern Africa. So data held with a global provider by a Nigerian business is generally held outside Nigeria.
Four cables serving West Africa — WACS, ACE, MainOne and SAT-3 — failed at once near Côte d'Ivoire, disrupting connectivity in thirteen countries. Nigerian bank customers could not transact, and repairs were estimated at up to eight weeks. The lesson is structural: traffic that crosses a subsea path is exposed to the state of that path, and traffic between a Lagos server and a Nigerian user does not have to cross one.
Mobile ones, overwhelmingly: 189.68 million active subscriptions in May 2026, with MTN Nigeria and Airtel Nigeria holding around 86% of lines; the licensed ISP segment totalled 352,006 subscriptions at the end of 2025, a much smaller measure. Traffic between your instance and a Nigerian user on any of those is domestic at both ends. Traffic leaving the country goes out through the Lagos landings like everyone else's.
Lagos, Nairobi and Dar es Salaam are one account, one API and one bill, with the region chosen per instance, and every instance gets a dedicated IPv4 and a free /64 IPv6 by default. Treat personal data deliberately when you replicate: a copy in ke-1a or tz-1a is a transfer out of Nigeria under section 41.
No — registration with the Commission and the controller obligations belong to you, wherever the server sits. What the region gives you is residency: the data is held in Nigeria, under Nigerian law, so section 41 has nothing to act on for records that never leave.
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. ng-1a is in Lagos, which is the location input. How your own systems and retention periods map onto the circular is a question for your compliance function — start it early, because the deadline is fixed and the architecture work is not.
Cloud servers and VPS on Linux or Windows, dedicated servers, and S3-compatible object storage on the ng-1a.s3.lineserve.net endpoint, behind a published 99.9% uptime SLA with always-on DDoS mitigation, snapshots and scheduled backups. Colocation in Lagos is quoted rather than listed — send rack, power and cross-connect requirements to [email protected]. Ask any provider what their SLA pays when missed: the remedy matters more than the number.