Solutions — hosted in Lagos, ng-1a
Infrastructure for what Nigeria actually runs
Startups, agencies and enterprise are useful shortcuts, but the thing that decides your architecture is the workload. A payment ledger under a January 2027 localisation deadline, a bet placement API that sees its whole day in the ninety seconds around kickoff, a retailer whose year is decided in November — three different problems built from the same blocks. All of them run in ng-1a, in Lagos, from NGN 13,890 a month, quoted and invoiced in Naira.
For startups
Launch for $13.51, pay in local currency, and scale into the full stack when you win.
For startupsFor agencies
Run every client on one platform, white-labelled, with margin you keep.
For agenciesFor enterprise
Reliability, dedicated hardware, and data that stays in-country, under SLA.
For enterpriseColocation
Bring your own hardware into our Tier III facilities.
ColocationWho runs here
Eight Nigerian workloads, described by what they do all day
Nigeria's hosting buyers are not the same set as its neighbours'. This is a regulated-industry market at very large user scale, with a localisation deadline already on the calendar.
Payments and fintech
The largest startup category in the country. Payment API gateways answering well under a second, ledger and reconciliation databases, webhook receivers taking interbank transfer callbacks, KYC and identity verification, fraud scoring, and audit archives kept for years. The CBN's circular of 15 June 2026 directs that Nigeria-generated payment transaction data be stored and managed in Nigeria from 1 January 2027 — which decides the region before anyone opens a pricing page.
Betting and iGaming
One of Nigeria's largest online sectors, and the burstiest load here. Odds ingestion, bet placement APIs that take their whole daily peak in the minutes around kickoff, real-time settlement, heavy read-replica usage, and terminal backends serving thousands of agents. Since a November 2024 Supreme Court ruling moved authority to the states, per-state reporting is part of the build.
E-commerce and online retail
Nigerian retail has a calendar: an October-to-December run through Black Friday and the festive season, with one operator moving 5.6 million packages in a single Black Friday campaign. Catalogue and search, cart and checkout, payment callbacks, dispatch integration, and imagery served from object storage next door to the store.
Streaming, media and publishing
Nigeria produces a great deal of what Nigeria watches and listens to, and media comes down to origin storage plus egress: transcoding pipelines, catalogue services, entitlement databases, object stores feeding a cache. Every megabyte served from Lagos is one that did not cross a subsea cable to reach a Nigerian viewer.
Edtech and exam platforms
UTME and JAMB preparation, coding bootcamps and school platforms — video lesson delivery, question banks, progress databases, and exam-window traffic that is a hard, predictable national peak. The constraint is economic: a platform charging a few thousand Naira a month cannot carry a foreign cloud bill per user. An M1 at NGN 42,400 that resizes for an exam week beats a box sized for the year's worst day.
Agencies, resellers and the .ng long tail
Lagos has one of the densest agency and web-shop markets anywhere, and most Nigerian SME sites end up pointed at something one of them chose. Multi-tenant hosting, staging environments, control-panel stacks, Git deploys and white-label plans under your own brand. What matters is a per-client cost you can mark up without a currency conversion inside your margin — several small instances from NGN 21,950 each.
ISPs, WISPs and network operators
Behind the mobile operators sits a licensed ISP segment — Spectranet, Starlink, FiberOne, ipNX, Tizeti and a long tail behind them, 352,006 active subscriptions at the end of 2025. RADIUS, resolvers and authoritative zones, mail relays, billing portals, IPAM, NetFlow collectors, looking glass. Each is a service to Nigerian networks measured by Nigerian users, so hosting them elsewhere is actively worse.
Always-on desks and anything replacing an office server
The grid collapsed in December 2025 and again in January 2026, and twenty-four listed companies spent ₦400.83 billion on diesel, gas and alternative energy in the first quarter of 2026 alone. That is the real argument for moving a machine out of a cupboard: a trading terminal, an accounting server or a scheduler that must keep running when the building does not. What replaces the fuel account is a fixed Naira line item with a 99.9% SLA behind it.
Owned hardware and single-tenant databases sit at the colocation end of the same platform: dedicated servers, rack space in Lagos, and private networking back to your cloud instances.
Network
Distance costs some of these workloads far more than others
A brochure site makes a handful of requests and the reader forgives all of them. A checkout makes dozens, in series, at the moment a customer decides whether to hand over money. A bet placement API has a stadium's worth of people pressing the same button in the same ten seconds. Distance is charged per round trip, and the workloads that make thousands of them are where a Lagos origin stops being a preference and becomes the design.
Nigeria's geography helps here. Eight subsea systems come ashore in and around Lagos, so the international capacity and the region sit in the same metro, and the audience is mobile: 189.68 million active subscriptions in May 2026, MTN Nigeria and Airtel Nigeria holding roughly 86% of lines between them.
189.68M
Active mobile subscriptions (NCC, May 2026)
8
Subsea cable systems landing in Nigeria
13
IXPN points of presence, across seven states
352,006
Active licensed-ISP subscriptions (Q4 2025)
Currency
Quoted in Naira, and settled the way Nigeria settles
Nigeria is a bank-transfer market before it is a card market, which is the sharpest structural difference between this page and its Kenyan and Tanzanian equivalents. Instant interbank transfer has been the national default since NIBSS launched the scheme in 2011: an account number, an amount, a reference, a confirmation in seconds.
Bank transfer, for anything procurement touches
The rail an XL1 at NGN 165,100 a month, an annual invoice at ten months for twelve, or a colocation quote actually runs on. It arrives with a reference your accounts team can match to a requisition, which makes it the natural fit once a purchase order exists.
Card, where the finance team prefers one
Visa and Mastercard, in Naira, for a recurring monthly line where one person owns the budget and nobody wants a transfer to raise every thirty days.
One currency, end to end
You are quoted in Naira and invoiced in Naira, so the figure that goes into a forecast is the figure that comes out of it. For an edtech pricing per student or an agency pricing per client site, that is the difference between a margin you can plan and one you discover.
Tax, invoicing and budgets
The part finance decides, not engineering
Nigeria's tax regime changed on 1 January 2026, and anything you remember from before that date is worth re-checking. 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 — materially lower than the 16% and 18% charged on the same class of service in Kenya and Tanzania. Prices exclude VAT.
The other half of the 2026 change is the invoice itself. 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.
Buying against a budget year
Annual billing is ten months for twelve: one approval, one payment, one document for the file. Useful when spend has to be committed inside a window, and again for the seasonal buyers on this page — a retailer wants capacity committed before late October, an exam platform before the window rather than during it.
Withholding, for the CFO who asks first
A Nigerian company paying an overseas supplier has a position to take on 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 it needs.
Colocation and larger dedicated builds are quoted rather than listed — rack units, power per rack, connectivity and remote hands vary too widely for a price card. Send the requirements to [email protected].
Data residency
Residency matters far more to some of these buyers than others
Nigeria's Data Protection Act 2023 is administered by the Nigeria Data Protection Commission, and the General Application and Implementation Directive of 2025, effective 19 September 2025, turned it into an administered regime with registration and filing attached. 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. Each is something to choose, paper and maintain. Hold the data in ng-1a and none of it has anything to act on.
Payments has a date, and the date is 1 January 2027
The Central Bank of Nigeria's circular of 15 June 2026 directs that Nigeria-generated payment transaction data be stored and managed in Nigeria from 1 January 2027, reaching banks, mobile money operators, fintechs, switching companies, payment service providers and super agents. For anyone on that list the region is a calendar entry rather than an architectural preference.
For everyone else it is a procurement answer
A school platform or an agency's client site is under no sectoral mandate, and will still be asked where the data is held — by a bank onboarding it, by a client's security review. Answering with the name of a city closes that conversation. Registration with the Commission and the rest of the controller's job stay yours.
Moving in
What changes depends on where you are now
From an overseas provider
The engineering is the easy half: provision, rsync, dump and restore, run both in parallel for a day, cut the DNS. What changes the business case is commercial and regulatory. Today the price moves with the exchange rate and the answer to where the data is held is a country your regulator has no reach into. Afterwards it is a Naira figure you can carry through a twelve-month budget, a Lagos region you can name in a security review, and — for a licensed payments participant — a location on the right side of a deadline.
From a Nigerian shared host or reseller
A Lagos location and Naira billing are table stakes here; the local field advertises both and is right to. So the reason to move is never those. It is the layer underneath: infrastructure primitives instead of a resold control panel — an API and a CLI, snapshots and scheduled backups, private networking, live resize up to 32 vCPU and 64 GB, a 99.9% SLA that pays service credits, and object storage, dedicated hardware and two more regions on one account.
Four questions are worth putting to any provider, this one included. Which city is the machine in, and will they name it? What does the SLA pay when it is missed, and who claims it? What happens when a disk fails at 02:00? And what does the invoice carry that your finance function needs?
FAQ
Questions, answered
Pick by workload rather than by label. Shipping one product: a Linux VPS you resize. Many client sites: the agency route, with white-label hosting and one bill. A single-tenant database, a licensing constraint or a regulator to satisfy: dedicated hardware or colocation. Most Nigerian buyers end up with a mix, on one account.
The circular of 15 June 2026 directs that Nigeria-generated payment transaction data 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 systems and retention periods map onto it is a question for your compliance function and counsel. Start early — the deadline is fixed and the architecture work rarely is.
Size the read path for the burst and the write path for settlement, and treat them as separate problems. Read replicas absorb the odds and slip traffic; the ledger side wants headroom. vCPU, RAM and storage resize independently up to 32 vCPU and 64 GB with minimal downtime, so a match-day shape and a Tuesday shape are two configurations of the same machine.
Yes, and it is the sensible way to buy for a Nigerian retail calendar. Take the instance up in late October, hold it through the Black Friday and December run, and bring it back down in January, with images and static assets in object storage so the spike lands on a cache. Annual billing at ten months for twelve suits it when the commitment has to sit inside a budget year.
That is the right question to ask first, and it is why Naira pricing matters more here than a feature list. Start small, put video and static assets in object storage rather than on the instance disk, and resize into the exam windows instead of carrying peak capacity all year. Cloud servers start at NGN 13,890 a month and scale by the resource, not by the tier.
It moves the problem off your premises. A server in your own building is kept alive by a generator, an inverter and a fuel account that tracks the diesel price. In a region it becomes a fixed Naira line item with a 99.9% SLA behind it.
No. Compliance belongs to you as the controller, wherever the server sits. What a Lagos region gives you is residency: your personal data stays in Nigeria, so the section 41 instruments do not arise for it, and the answer to where the customer data is held becomes the name of a city rather than an appendix.
Sometimes not, and it is worth saying plainly. Put the origin where the audience is, and keep tooling, backups and internal systems close to the team. Lagos, Nairobi and Dar es Salaam run on one account and one API, so a two-region layout is a deployment decision rather than a second supplier. Where the data is personal data about Nigerians, treat any copy held abroad as a transfer.
Send your TIN, your registered name and any purchase-order reference to [email protected] before you order; VAT is 7.5% on cloud and hosting services and displayed prices exclude it. Owned hardware is colocation, quoted rather than listed — tell sales the rack units, the power per rack and when the equipment ships. Colocated kit can sit on private networking alongside cloud instances in the same region.