Object Storage — ke-1a, tz-1a and ng-1a endpoints
S3-compatible object storage inside Kenya, Tanzania and Nigeria
S3-compatible storage that plays nice with your tools — and your budget.
When a customer's regulator names a country, the question stops being which cloud you like and becomes which country the bytes are in. Lineserve has three regional endpoints — ke-1a.s3.lineserve.net in Nairobi, tz-1a.s3.lineserve.net in Dar es Salaam and ng-1a.s3.lineserve.net in Lagos — each holding its objects inside the country it names. The API is S3-compatible, so the AWS CLI, boto3, rclone, s3cmd, MinIO Client and any S3 SDK work unchanged. Storage is $0.061 per GB a month and falls to $0.035 at scale, with transfer in, transfer out and API requests free at every tier, billed in US dollars.
- Three endpoints — ke-1a, tz-1a and ng-1a .s3.lineserve.net
- Objects stay in the country whose endpoint you wrote them to
- S3-compatible — keep the AWS CLI, boto3, rclone and your SDKs
- Free transfer in and out, and free API requests, at every tier
- From $0.061 per GB a month, billed in USD by card or bank transfer
No credit card required · Local billing in KES, TZS, NGN & UGX
Pricing
Cheaper the more you store
Tiered storage that drops as you grow, with free data transfer and free API requests — you only ever pay for what you store, so serving your own files never triggers a shock bill.
Starter
Up to 1 TB
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
Side projects and small apps.
Create a bucketGrowth
Up to 5 TB
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
Growing products and teams.
Create a bucketBusiness
Up to 10 TB
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
Data-heavy production workloads.
Create a bucketEnterprise
10 TB+
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
Custom quote for scale.
Contact salesTransfer & requests — same at every tier
Prices exclude VAT. Storage is billed on average monthly usage, and the per-GB rate follows your total stored volume. Data transfer and requests are free. Local currency figures are indicative and settled at checkout.
Network & egress
Serving Nairobi, Dar es Salaam or Lagos from another continent costs twice
No hyperscaler runs a cloud region in Kenya, Tanzania or Nigeria. Amazon's African region is Cape Town; Microsoft's is in South Africa. Nairobi and Lagos carry content-delivery points of presence from the large clouds, and Tanzania carries none at all — the nearest nodes to a Dar es Salaam viewer sit in Nairobi, Mombasa, Lagos, Johannesburg and Cape Town. So a company serving these three countries from a bucket abroad is serving them from another continent, and paying international egress for the privilege on every read, forever.
Egress is the line that grows quietly, because it is the one number on the invoice your users choose for you. Storage is a figure you decided on; egress is decided by how well the product is doing. A logistics platform whose drivers upload delivery photographs is billed for the upload once and for the download every time a claims officer opens one. A media service pays for every play. An agency pays for every visitor its client's site attracts. On Lineserve object storage that line does not exist: transfer in, transfer out and API requests are free at every tier, and you pay for what you store.
Underneath the bill is the distance itself. Kenya's international capacity lands at Mombasa and runs roughly 480 km inland to Nairobi, where KIXP has exchanged domestic traffic since 2002 across 141 peer networks and 2.9 Tbps of capacity. Dar es Salaam is a landing point in its own right, with SEACOM, EASSy and SEAS ashore in the city and 13,820 km of state backbone fibre reaching the regions. Lagos takes eight subsea systems and interconnects Nigerian networks at IXPN, 13 points of presence across seven states, with peak domestic traffic past 2 Tbps by March 2026. A GET from a Lagos user against a Lagos bucket needs none of the subsea path. The same GET against a Frankfurt bucket needs all of it, twice, per object.
That matters most where the objects are biggest and the devices are smallest. Internet access in all three countries is overwhelmingly mobile — mid-range Android handsets on cellular networks — and a page that assembles itself from thirty objects pays the distance thirty times. Moving the origin into the country is usually the single largest improvement available to a product whose code you are otherwise happy with.
3
Regional endpoints — Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and Lagos
0
Hyperscale cloud regions in Kenya, Tanzania or Nigeria
Free
Transfer in, transfer out and API requests, at every tier
$0.035
Per GB a month at scale, from $0.061 at the entry tier
Origin locally, cache globally
Plenty of international products serve a global audience and a national dataset at the same time. The shape that satisfies both is an origin bucket in the country with a CDN in front of it: the origin holds the records and the masters where the regulator wants them, and the cache handles the distance for everybody else. That is an ordinary architecture rather than a trade-off, and it is the one most residency requirements were written to permit.
The endpoint is the only change
Point the AWS CLI, boto3, rclone, s3cmd or MinIO Client at https://ke-1a.s3.lineserve.net, https://tz-1a.s3.lineserve.net or https://ng-1a.s3.lineserve.net and keep the rest of your code. Same commands, same SDKs, same bucket policies and presigned URLs. In most stacks it is one environment variable and one set of credentials.
Payments
Paying for a bill that grows on its own
From outside the three countries you are quoted, invoiced and settled in US dollars by card or bank transfer. Storage has a distinctive billing shape: it starts small, it never goes down on its own, and it is billed on average monthly usage rather than on a peak. The per-GB rate follows your total stored volume — $0.061 up to 1 TB, $0.053 up to 5 TB, $0.044 up to 10 TB and $0.035 beyond it — so crossing a boundary lowers the rate instead of triggering a penalty.
Card
Visa and Mastercard, charged in USD. Suits a bucket that is still small, a proof of concept, or a first country where the monthly figure is measured in tens of dollars rather than thousands.
Bank transfer
The rail for a real archive. Ten terabytes at $0.035 a GB, three countries' worth of buckets on one invoice, or a year taken up front at ten months for twelve — one instruction with a reference your reconciliation picks up.
Or bill the local subsidiary
If your Kenyan, Tanzanian or Nigerian entity should carry the storage cost, switch it to that market and it settles in KES, TZS or NGN. Kenya and Tanzania add M-Pesa alongside bank transfer and card; Nigeria settles in Naira by bank transfer or card.
Nothing metered on the way out
The reason storage invoices surprise people elsewhere is that the largest line is usually not storage. Transfer in, transfer out and API requests are free at every tier here, so the bill tracks the size of your data rather than the popularity of it — which is the version a finance team can forecast twelve months ahead.
Displayed prices exclude tax; where VAT applies it is calculated and shown separately at checkout. Volume above 10 TB is quoted — tell [email protected] how much and in which countries.
The platform
Everything the S3 ecosystem expects
A complete, compatible object store — the endpoints, semantics, and controls your existing tools already know how to talk to.
S3-compatible API
Standard S3 endpoints and semantics. Point your existing SDKs and tools at us and go.
Access keys & policies
Issue scoped access keys and bucket policies to control exactly who reaches what.
Encrypted at rest
Objects are encrypted at rest by default, with TLS in transit on every request.
Versioning
Keep object history and recover from accidental overwrites and deletes.
Lifecycle rules
Expire or transition objects automatically on a schedule you set per bucket.
Presigned URLs
Grant temporary, time-limited access to a single object without sharing keys.
Static website hosting
Serve a static site or SPA straight from a bucket, no server required.
Generous free egress
Serve your own data without the runaway transfer bills global clouds are known for.
Regional endpoints
Store data in the region closest to your users and keep it on the continent.
Regions & endpoints
Store where your users are
Put your data in the region closest to the people reading it. Every region exposes its own S3 endpoint — single-digit latency within the metro, data kept on the continent.
Kenya
ke-1a.s3.lineserve.net
ke-1a.s3.lineserve.net
Nairobi metro
Tanzania
tz-1a.s3.lineserve.net
tz-1a.s3.lineserve.net
Dar es Salaam metro
Nigeria
ng-1a.s3.lineserve.net
ng-1a.s3.lineserve.net
Lagos metro
Drop-in compatible
Keep the tools you already use
Because the API is S3-compatible, nothing in your stack has to change. Set the endpoint, keep your code. The AWS CLI, boto3, rclone, s3cmd, and any S3 SDK work out of the box.
# Point the AWS CLI at your region endpoint — that's the only change.
aws s3 --endpoint-url https://ke-1a.s3.lineserve.net \
cp ./backup.tar.gz s3://my-bucket/backups/Same commands, same SDKs. Just a different endpoint.
Use cases
What people store with us
Backups & archives
Offsite backups and long-term archives, priced so keeping data is never the problem.
Media & static assets
Images, video, and downloads served fast from the region nearest your audience.
App & user uploads
A durable home for everything your application writes — attachments, exports, logs.
Data lakes & analytics
Land raw data for pipelines and analytics, close to the compute that reads it.
How it works
Storing data in three steps
Create a bucket
Choose a region and name your bucket from the console or the API.
Get your access keys
Issue a scoped access key and secret for your app or tool.
Upload with any S3 tool
Point your existing SDK or CLI at the endpoint and start reading and writing.
Availability SLA
99.9%
- Objects stored redundantly and encrypted at rest
- Service credits applied automatically when we miss the SLA
- Tier III colocation facilities across all live regions
Reliability
When a disk fails in a city you cannot get to
Your objects are stored redundantly and encrypted at rest, served from Tier III facilities, and backed by a 99.9% availability SLA. Reach a real engineer in your region and timezone when you need one.
Why Lineserve
The costs that actually add up
Tax & invoicing
One storage line, three tax regimes underneath it
Which VAT rate reaches your invoice follows where you buy from and which market bills you, not which endpoint the objects sit behind. Buy from outside the three countries and you are billed in dollars against your own entity while the data lives in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam or Lagos. Buy through a local subsidiary and that country's treatment applies: Kenya charges 16% on digital and hosting services through the Kenya Revenue Authority, whose published list of taxable digital services names cloud backup explicitly; Tanzania's mainland rate is 18% through the Tanzania Revenue Authority, with Zanzibar administered separately; Nigeria charges 7.5% through the Nigeria Revenue Service.
Storage is the line most likely to be booked every month for years, which makes the invoice format worth settling once at the start. Tanzania requires an Electronic Fiscal Device verification code on a mainland receipt before a VAT-registered buyer can claim input tax. Nigeria's framework changed on 1 January 2026 and large taxpayers are already inside a mandatory e-invoicing regime. Kenya's claimable invoice carries both parties' tax identifiers, the taxable value and the VAT as a separate line. Send [email protected] the identifiers for every entity that will appear on an invoice and it is configured once rather than corrected in the third quarter.
The other question a finance function asks about storage is how it is measured. Billing is on average monthly usage, so a bucket that doubled on the fifteenth is charged as a bucket that was half that size for half the month. The rate then follows your total stored volume across the account rather than per bucket, which means a three-country deployment reaches the lower tiers on the strength of the whole estate rather than the largest single bucket.
One invoice, or one per country
The default is one account, one console and one USD invoice covering buckets in all three regions. The alternative is each subsidiary holding its own account in its own currency so the cost lands in the right ledger and the right VAT return. Both are supported, and the second is a five-minute conversation before you order rather than a migration afterwards.
Withholding, before your CFO raises it
A Tanzanian business paying a non-resident for services withholds 15% of the gross consideration unless a double tax agreement reduces it, and a Nigerian payer is frequently a withholding agent filing a monthly schedule naming each supplier. Lineserve invoices from LINESERVE, INC. On a long-lived storage contract this is a cash-flow question — settle it with your adviser and bring us into the conversation so the invoicing matches how you remit.
Prices exclude VAT. Nigeria's tax framework changed on 1 January 2026, so guidance written before that date is worth re-reading before you rely on it.
Data residency
Putting the data in the country a regulator actually named
This is the reason most international buyers arrive on this page. A customer's procurement form, a donor's data protection annex or a regulator's directive names a country, and your object store is in Frankfurt or Virginia. Storage is where the awkward data usually lives — identity documents, signed contracts, survey submissions with photographs attached, medical records, statement PDFs, transaction archives — so it is where the question lands hardest. Three endpoints answer it directly: objects written to ke-1a.s3.lineserve.net are held in Nairobi, to tz-1a.s3.lineserve.net in Dar es Salaam, to ng-1a.s3.lineserve.net in Lagos, and they do not leave the country without your instruction.
The three laws behind that are not interchangeable. Kenya's Data Protection Act, No. 24 of 2019 is enforced by the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner; sections 48 and 49 allow transfer out of Kenya on proof of appropriate safeguards, with a stricter test for sensitive personal data. Regulation 26 of the 2021 General Regulations goes further for six named purposes — civil registration and identity, elections, public finance systems, designated protected computer systems, basic education, and primary or secondary health care — requiring either processing through a server and data centre in Kenya, or at least one serving copy stored in a data centre in Kenya. Read that second limb again: it is an object-storage requirement in everything but name, and international programmes in health and education meet it more often than their architects expect.
Tanzania is the strictest of the three. Personal data leaves the country on a permit from the Personal Data Protection Commission, applied for under the Personal Data Protection Act, 2022 with the recipient, the categories of data, the purpose and duration, the destination and the security arrangements at the far end all set out. The Commission may approve, ask for more, or refuse, and it monitors the permit afterwards. That is prior authorisation rather than self-assessment, and it is why a bucket in Dar es Salaam is a materially different proposition from an identical bucket in Johannesburg.
Nigeria carries the hardest date. Section 41 of the Data Protection Act 2023, administered by the Nigeria Data Protection Commission, permits transfer where the recipient is covered by an adequate law, binding corporate rules, contractual clauses, a code of conduct or a certification mechanism. On top of it, a Central Bank of Nigeria 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, reaching merchant records, transaction identifiers, timestamps, settlement information and processing logs held by CBN-licensed participants. If your platform stores any of that, the archive is in scope as much as the live database.
What a bucket in the country gives you is the location: data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act, Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act and Nigeria's Data Protection Act. The assessment, the registrations and the sign-off stay with your own compliance function. What it removes is the cross-border transfer analysis for the data that stays — and on a storage estate that is often the largest single volume of personal data a company holds about a country's residents.
The second copy is a transfer
Object storage makes replication trivial, which is exactly how a residency position gets undone by a lifecycle rule nobody reviewed. Decide every destination deliberately: a copy of Tanzanian personal data in Lagos is a transfer out of Tanzania under the permit regime, and Nigerian payment data takes its localisation position with the copy. Versioning, lifecycle rules and a second bucket in the same region give you durability without moving anything across a border.
Traffic in the other direction
Moving personal data into these regions from the EU or the UK is a transfer under your own law, and your data protection officer runs that analysis rather than us. Most international buyers land on the same architecture regardless: the country's own users' data in the country's own bucket, and the rest of the estate exactly where it already is.
Ask any provider the same question
Which country are the objects in, and can you show me the endpoint that keeps them there? Storage marketed as local is sometimes a bucket somewhere else behind a local brand. The endpoint, the region code and the country are one sentence with a checkable answer — put the question to us and to everyone else on your shortlist.
Who stores here
What international teams keep in ke-1a, tz-1a and ng-1a
SaaS with a residency clause in the contract
The application stays in Frankfurt or Virginia; the tenant's documents move into the tenant's country. Per-tenant buckets, scoped access keys, presigned URLs for time-limited access to a single object, and an endpoint you can name in the data processing annex. It is the cheapest possible answer to a clause that would otherwise cost you the deal or a regional rebuild.
Fintech and payments archives
KYC document images, identity scans, signed mandates, statement PDFs pulled for scoring, settlement files and transaction logs kept for as long as a licence requires. Nigeria has a date — payment transaction data generated in the country is directed to be stored and managed there from 1 January 2027 — and archives are usually the part of an estate that gets remembered last.
Donor programmes and field data collection
KoboToolbox and ODK submissions with photographs and GPS attached, DHIS2 exports, monitoring-and-evaluation datasets, and the beneficiary records underneath both. This is personal data about people in the country, collected in the country, and the donor's audit and the national regulator ask about it from different directions. One bucket per country, at the country's endpoint, answers both.
Media, streaming and anything with real egress
Origin storage plus egress is the shape distance punishes hardest, and Tanzania has no content-delivery edge at all, so a Dar es Salaam viewer is served from another country however the CDN is configured. Masters and renditions in the country, a cache in front for everyone else, and no per-gigabyte transfer line on the way out.
Agencies and integrators running client estates
One bucket per client, media offloaded from the web servers, nightly site backups written by rclone on a cron, and an endpoint in whichever of the three countries the client's tender specified. One supplier to onboard through procurement instead of three, and the same tooling across all of them.
Backups for infrastructure you already run in-country
If you already have servers, a rack or a partner deployment in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam or Lagos, the backups are frequently the only part of the estate still leaving the country — and a backup of personal data is personal data. In-region object storage keeps the copy on the right side of the border and inside the same account as the machines it protects.
Datasets and archives that outlive the project
Research corpora, satellite and drone imagery, sensor histories, scanned records, machine-learning training sets. They are written once, read occasionally, and kept for years, which makes the per-GB rate and the absence of retrieval charges the whole economics. Above 10 TB the rate is $0.035 a GB and the tier is quoted.
$0.061 per GB a month up to 1 TB, $0.053 up to 5 TB, $0.044 up to 10 TB and $0.035 beyond it, billed on average monthly usage, with transfer in, transfer out and API requests free at every tier.
Getting here
Move the bucket, or add one in the country
From an overseas bucket
Mechanically this is the easiest migration in infrastructure, because both ends speak S3: rclone sync copies the objects across directly, and the only change in your application is the endpoint URL and the credentials. Two things are worth pricing before you start. Your current provider may charge egress to read your own data out, so a 5 TB migration is 5 TB of their transfer bill — that cost is theirs, not ours, and it is better discovered in a spreadsheet than in an invoice. And decide up front whether the old bucket is being emptied or kept: a copy left behind in Virginia is still a copy of that country's personal data outside the country.
Alongside the storage you already have
The more common shape, and the faster one. Keep your primary object store exactly where it is for everything that has no country attached — build artefacts, logs, global assets — and put a bucket in ke-1a, tz-1a or ng-1a under the data that does: the tenant documents, the field submissions, the payment archive, the media served to that country's users. Route by tenant or by data class in your storage layer, which is usually a configuration change rather than a code one, and the residency question is answered without touching the rest of the estate.
Migration planning and assistance are included at no extra charge. Tell [email protected] how much data you hold, where it is now and which country it needs to be in, and the reply is a plan and a rate rather than a brochure.
FAQ
Questions, answered
Yes. We implement the standard S3 API, so the AWS CLI, boto3, rclone, s3cmd, and any S3 SDK work by simply pointing at your region's endpoint. No code changes needed.
There's no egress bill. Data transfer in and out — and API requests — are all free. You only pay for what you store, so serving your own files never triggers a surprise charge.
Objects are stored redundantly and encrypted at rest. Availability is backed by a 99.9% SLA. See the durability section for the specifics of the redundancy in your region.
Yes. Issue scoped access keys, set bucket policies, and generate presigned URLs for temporary, single-object access without sharing keys.
Yes. Enable static website hosting on a bucket to serve a static site or SPA directly, with no server to run.
Yes. Because we're S3-compatible, tools like rclone move data across directly. Our team will help you plan and run the migration at no charge.
You can create multiple buckets per account, and object sizes follow standard S3 multipart limits. Need a higher account limit? Just ask.
https://ke-1a.s3.lineserve.net for Nairobi, https://tz-1a.s3.lineserve.net for Dar es Salaam and https://ng-1a.s3.lineserve.net for Lagos. The endpoint you write to is the country the objects are held in.
Yes. The API is S3-compatible, so set the endpoint and keep your code — the CLI flags, the SDK calls, the bucket policies and the presigned URLs behave the same. s3cmd, MinIO Client and any other S3 SDK work the same way.
Yes. Objects written to a regional endpoint are held in that region's city and are not moved out of the country without your instruction. That gives you data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act, Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act or Nigeria's Data Protection Act, depending on the endpoint.
That is the case this product is bought for. You place the bucket at that country's endpoint, name it in your data processing documentation, and the objects stay there. Whether your processing as a whole satisfies your customer's obligation is a question for their counsel and yours — what we supply is the location, verifiably.
No. Amazon's African region is Cape Town and Microsoft's is in South Africa. Nairobi and Lagos carry content-delivery points of presence, which cache static content but are not where a bucket lives, and Tanzania has neither a region nor an edge presence.
Transfer in, transfer out and API requests are free at every tier. You pay for what you store, billed on average monthly usage, which is what makes a storage bill forecastable a year ahead rather than a function of how popular your product became.
The rate follows your total stored volume: $0.061 per GB a month up to 1 TB, $0.053 up to 5 TB, $0.044 up to 10 TB and $0.035 beyond it. Crossing a boundary lowers the rate rather than triggering a penalty, and volume above 10 TB is quoted.
Yes — all three endpoints run on one account and one set of tooling. Make it a deliberate decision for personal data: a copy of Tanzanian personal data in Lagos is a transfer out of Tanzania, which requires a permit from the Personal Data Protection Commission, and Nigerian payment data carries its localisation position with the copy.
rclone sync copies objects between S3-compatible endpoints directly, and the application change is the endpoint and the credentials. Check what your current provider charges in egress to read your own data out before you start, and decide whether the old bucket is being emptied or kept.
Objects are encrypted at rest by default and every request is TLS-encrypted in transit. Access is controlled with scoped access keys and bucket policies, with presigned URLs for handing out time-limited access to a single object without sharing credentials.
Yes. Enable static website hosting to serve a static site or single-page application, or put a CDN in front of the bucket and keep the origin in-country — origin locally, cache globally, which is the usual shape when the audience is partly abroad.
No. The account is yours wherever you are and the endpoint is a choice at bucket creation. A local entity affects how you would like to be billed and taxed, not where you can store.
US dollars, by card or bank transfer, if you are buying from outside the three countries. Switching to the Kenya, Tanzania or Nigeria market bills the same storage in KES, TZS or NGN with that country's payment methods.
Displayed prices exclude tax, and where VAT applies it is calculated and shown separately at checkout. The domestic rates differ — Kenya 16%, Tanzania 18% on the mainland, Nigeria 7.5% — and which reaches your invoice follows which market bills you, not which endpoint you write to.
Yes. Tell [email protected] how much you hold today, how fast it grows and which countries it has to sit in, and you get a rate and a migration plan. Volume above 10 TB is quoted.
Customer references are available under NDA. Tell [email protected] what you are storing and which country it is for, and you will be pointed at the closest match.
Start storing in minutes, not migrations
S3-compatible, encrypted, and close to your users — with egress that won't surprise you. Pay in local currency, no card required to start.
No credit card required · 99.9% availability SLA · Local billing in KES, TZS, NGN & UGX