Cloud Servers — hosted in Dar es Salaam (tz-1a)
Cloud Hosting in Tanzania
A region in Dar es Salaam, an invoice in shillings.
Open any large cloud provider's map of this part of the world and Tanzania is blank — no region, and no edge location either. Cloud hosting in Tanzania has usually meant a console in your browser and a machine in somebody else's country. tz-1a is in Dar es Salaam. Build a server by the vCPU, the gigabyte of RAM and the gigabyte of SSD, from TZS 27,780 a month, quoted and settled in Tanzanian Shillings, live in under 60 seconds and resizable the day the traffic changes.
1 vCPU · 1 GB RAM · 20 GB SSD · IPv4 included — build exactly the server you need.
- Dar es Salaam region (tz-1a) — your compute is in the country, not near it
- Priced per vCPU, per GB of RAM and per GB of SSD — from TZS 27,780/month
- Quoted, invoiced and settled in TZS
- Data residency for Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act — your data stays in-country
- Deploy in under 60 seconds, resize on demand, 99.9% uptime SLA
No credit card required · Local billing in KES, TZS & NGN
Pricing calculator
Build exactly the server you need
No fixed plans — pay per vCPU, per GB of RAM and per GB of SSD. Linux images are free; Windows Server adds a license fee. In your currency, no forex.
Operating system
Minimum 20 GB for Linux images.
Your server
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos
- Compute2 vCPU · 4 GB RAM
- Storage40 GB Universal SSD
- Public IPv41 address
- ImageLinux (free)
Unit rates
| Resource | Unit | Price /mo |
|---|---|---|
| vCPU | per vCPU | TZS 8,660 |
| RAM | per GB | TZS 6,120 |
| Storage — Universal SSD | per GB | TZS 500 |
| Public IPv4 | per address | TZS 3,000 |
| Windows Server 2019 Standard | per server | From TZS 16,000 |
| Windows Server 2022 Standard | per server | From TZS 20,000 |
| Windows Server 2025 Standard | per server | From TZS 24,000 |
| Bandwidth | 1 Gbps port, unlimited local traffic | Free |
| IPv6 (/64) | per server | Free |
| Linux images | Ubuntu, Debian, Rocky, AlmaLinux | Free |
Prices exclude VAT and any applicable taxes. Annual billing gives you two months free. Local currency figures are indicative and settled at checkout.
Network
Tanzania is a gap on the cloud map
The nearest hyperscale cloud regions to Dar es Salaam are in South Africa. Amazon's African region is Cape Town, with three availability zones and a local zone in Johannesburg; Microsoft's is in South Africa. That is over three thousand kilometres away, in another country, under another legal system, across borders your data has to be authorised to cross. A Tanzanian business running on a global cloud is not being served from Tanzania. It is being served from South Africa and told that is close enough.
The part buyers here discover late is the edge tier, which is meant to paper over exactly this. The published African content delivery points of presence sit in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Nairobi, Lagos and Mombasa. There is not one in Tanzania. Mombasa is a few hundred kilometres up the coast and still a foreign hop; Nairobi is another country's capital. So the standard architecture sold to a Dar es Salaam company puts the origin in one foreign country and the cache in another, and then measures the result in a dashboard hosted in a third. tz-1a closes the first and most expensive of those gaps: the origin is here.
What is in Tanzania is the infrastructure that matters for domestic traffic. TIX, the Tanzania Internet eXchange, has run in Dar es Salaam since 2003 as a project of TISPA, the Tanzanian ISP association — PeeringDB records 32 networks, 33 connections and 798G of connected capacity, at roughly 90% IPv6, with Akamai at 200G, Meta and TTCL at 100G each, Cloudflare at 30G. Peering there costs nothing: no port fee, no cross-connect fee, no membership fee. Five more TISPA exchanges cover Arusha, Dodoma, Mbeya, Mwanza and Zanzibar. Traffic between Tanzanian networks is exchanged in Tanzania, in the city your server is in.
Then the two things a Cape Town region can never offer a Tanzanian workload. International capacity comes ashore at Dar es Salaam — SEACOM, EASSy and SEAS land here, and Dar es Salaam is a named landing point on 2Africa. And the National ICT Broadband Backbone, government fibre managed by TTCL with 13,820 km laid of a 16,280 km target as of FY2024/25, carries traffic from that landing point to every region of the country and across the border into Zambia, Malawi, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. One origin in Dar es Salaam reaches Mwanza, Arusha, Dodoma, Mbeya and the inland corridors on domestic fibre. Your customer taps, and the request ends in the same city it started in. No ocean, no border, no cache in a neighbouring capital.
0
Hyperscale cloud regions in Tanzania
0
Major CDN points of presence in Tanzania
798G
Capacity connected at TIX, Dar es Salaam (PeeringDB)
58.9M
Internet subscriptions in Tanzania (TCRA, Q1 2026)
Four networks, none of them a majority
TCRA counts Vodacom at 36.19 million subscriptions (32.3%), Yas at 31.85 million (28.5%), Airtel Tanzania at 23.75 million (21.2%), Halotel at 18.32 million (16.4%) and TTCL at 1.80 million, for the quarter ending March 2026. There is no carrier you can pick and be broadly right about who your users are. What every one of them shares is a country — and an origin inside it is domestic to all four at once.
Almost all of it is mobile
Mobile wireless is roughly 99% of Tanzania's 58.9 million internet subscriptions, with 34.3 million on mobile broadband, smartphone penetration at 42.5% and 4G reaching 94.2% of the population. Cloud architecture for this market is architecture for a mid-range Android on a cell: fewer round trips, smaller payloads, and an origin that is not on the other side of a subsea cable.
Payments
Shillings first, then the wallet you already carry
In Tanzania the currency comes before the payment method, and it is not a house preference: since the implementing regulations took effect in March 2025, domestic prices here are quoted and settled in Tanzanian Shillings. So the configurator adds up in TZS, the invoice is issued in TZS, and the amount that leaves the account is the amount you approved. Then the wallet — and there is no default to assume. TCRA's March 2026 figures put M-Pesa, operated here by Vodacom Tanzania, at 40.97% of registered accounts, Mixx by Yas at 31.02% and Airtel Money at 17.79%, with HaloPesa holding most of the rest, across 80.98 million accounts. Underneath them all, the Bank of Tanzania's instant payment system TIPS links banks, wallets and licensed providers and moved US$11.6 billion in 2024.
M-Pesa
Pay in shillings from a wallet. A server built at TZS 27,780 a month is billed at TZS 27,780: no conversion, no international transaction on the statement, no foreign-transaction fee from your bank. VAT at 18% is calculated and shown at checkout.
Bank transfer
How most Tanzanian businesses settle anything sizeable. A fleet of instances, or a year taken up front at ten months for twelve, goes as a single transfer with a reference your finance team can reconcile against the invoice.
Card
Visa and Mastercard, billed in TZS. Card use in Tanzania runs heavily through ATMs rather than online, so the card is offered for the teams that prefer it rather than assumed to be how you pay.
The platform
A full cloud, not just a server
Every Cloud Server sits on a platform built to grow with you — automate it, resize it, connect it, and protect it, all from one place.
Deploy in 60 seconds
Provision a production-ready instance in under a minute, from console or API.
Resize on demand
Scale vCPU, RAM, and storage up as you grow, with minimal downtime.
NVMe SSD storage
Enterprise NVMe throughout for fast boot, quick builds, and low-latency databases.
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.
Free DDoS protection
Always-on network-layer mitigation included on every instance at no extra cost.
Full API & CLI
Manage everything as code — create, resize, snapshot, and destroy through a clean API.
IPv4 & IPv6
A dedicated IPv4 address plus native IPv6 on every instance.
Console access
Reach your server directly through a browser console when SSH or RDP isn't enough.
Regions
tz-1a is home. Nairobi and Lagos are on the same account.
Deploy in Dar es Salaam and your data stays in Tanzania, in the same city as most of the people using it. ke-1a in Nairobi and ng-1a in Lagos are one API call away on the same console and the same shilling bill, so a standby or an offsite copy is a line in a config file rather than a supplier to onboard. Typical in-metro round trips are around 6 ms in Dar es Salaam, ~2 ms in Nairobi and ~4 ms in Lagos.
Traffic between Tanzanian networks is exchanged in Dar es Salaam. The Tanzania Internet eXchange has run there since 2003 as a project of TISPA, the Tanzanian ISP association; PeeringDB records 32 networks and 798G of connected capacity there, with Akamai, Meta, Cloudflare and TTCL among them, and no fee to join. The point of a local exchange is a plain one: a packet from one Tanzanian network to another changes hands in the city, instead of being hauled to Europe and back to travel four kilometres.
International capacity comes ashore in the same city: SEACOM, EASSy and SEAS land at Dar es Salaam, a named landing point on 2Africa as well. Inland, the National ICT Broadband Backbone carries it onward — government fibre managed by TTCL, 13,820 km laid of a 16,280 km target as of FY2024/25, reaching every region and crossing into Zambia, Malawi, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. One origin in Dar es Salaam therefore has a real answer for a user in Mwanza, a site office outside Geita and a clearing agent at Tunduma.
TCRA's count for the quarter ending March 2026 tells you who is at the other end: Vodacom 36.19 million subscriptions, Yas 31.85 million, Airtel Tanzania 23.75 million, Halotel 18.32 million, against 58.9 million internet subscriptions nationally, roughly 99% of them mobile wireless. The largest reaches under a third of the country: no carrier arrangement covers a Tanzanian audience, and being inside Tanzania covers all of them at once.
Tanzania
Dar es Salaam
~6 ms
typical, within metro · Data stays in Tanzania
Kenya
Nairobi
~2 ms
typical, within metro · Data stays in Kenya
Nigeria
Lagos
~4 ms
typical, within metro · Data stays in Nigeria
Use cases
Built for what you're building
Web apps & APIs
Host Node, Python, Go, PHP, or .NET behind a load balancer with room to scale.
Databases
Run PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, or Redis on fast NVMe with the memory they need.
Containers & CI
A clean host for Docker, Compose, and build runners, close to your team and users.
Business systems
ERPs, internal tools, and line-of-business apps on Linux or Windows, run reliably.
How it works
Live in three steps
Choose region, OS & size
Pick a region, Linux or Windows, and the instance that fits your workload.
Deploy in under 60 seconds
We provision your server and run your setup — no manual first-run steps.
Connect & scale
Log in over SSH or RDP, then resize or snapshot anytime from the console or API.
Uptime SLA
99.9%
- When hardware fails
- When the region is the risk
- Service credits applied automatically when we miss the SLA
Support
A Tanzanian line, and a clock that already matches yours
Call +255 761 847 121. Tanzania is on East Africa Time all year with no daylight saving, so there is no drift to track and no arithmetic before you dial — business hours mean the same thing in March as in November. A ticket opened at the start of a Dar es Salaam morning lands inside a working day, rather than at the bottom of a queue that wakes up as yours is ending.
That match is worth the most at the moment you can least afford it. Month-end, last Friday, 16:40: the reconciliation job has stalled, the settlement file has not written, and the deadline is Monday. What you want then is an engineer who is awake and at work with your instance ID in front of them — a resize that needs a reboot window, a snapshot restored into a new instance, a routing question, a port that has stopped answering. Not a form, and not a five-hour wait for somebody's morning.
[email protected] takes the commercial half, and it is worth using before you order: your TIN and registered name as the TRA holds them, a purchase-order or grant code the invoice must carry, an annual invoice that fits the budget year. Migration planning and assistance come at no extra charge, from a rack in Frankfurt or from across town. Customer references are available under NDA.
Tanzania
+255 761 847 121
Sales
Why Lineserve
Decided on what actually matters here
Billing & tax
Metered by the resource, invoiced in shillings
A cloud server is priced as the sum of its parts, per month: TZS 8,660 per vCPU, TZS 6,120 per GB of RAM, TZS 500 per GB of Universal SSD, TZS 3,000 per public IPv4, and a /64 of IPv6 for nothing. The smallest real Linux server — 1 vCPU, 1 GB of RAM, 20 GB of SSD and one IPv4 — is TZS 27,780 a month. From there you go up to 32 vCPU, 128 GB of RAM and 16 TB of storage, and each dimension moves on its own. There are no plan tiers to jump: a programme that needs eight cores for a quarterly reporting run adds them and gives them back, and the bill follows the machine instead of the other way round. Windows Server 2019, 2022 and 2025 Standard are licensed per vCPU on a minimum of four cores, from TZS 4,000 per vCPU; Linux images are free. Annual billing is ten months for twelve.
The tax side is short and worth getting right at the start. Mainland VAT is 18%, administered by the Tanzania Revenue Authority, and it applies to digital and electronic services; Zanzibar runs its own regime through the Zanzibar Revenue Authority. Displayed prices exclude VAT and the tax is shown separately at checkout, so your capacity forecast and your quote carry the same figure. For a VAT-registered buyer the document matters as much as the amount: Tanzanian input-VAT recovery turns on holding an invoice with the required identifiers and a verification code under EFD protocol 2.1. Send your TIN, your registered name as the TRA holds it and any purchase-order reference to [email protected] before you build the first server, and every invoice afterwards is right.
What the price includes
NVMe-backed storage, a 1 Gbps port with unlimited local traffic, private networking within the region, on-demand snapshots and scheduled backups, always-on DDoS mitigation, a browser console for when SSH or RDP will not open, and a full API and CLI so create, resize, snapshot and destroy are all things your pipeline can do. No bandwidth line, no support tier, no per-request charge.
The two lines a CFO will raise
A Tanzanian business paying a non-resident for services withholds 15% of the gross consideration unless a double tax agreement reduces it, irrespective of where the service is performed; and a 2% digital service tax applies on gross payments to non-resident providers inside the electronic-services rules, on top of VAT. Put both in front of your tax adviser early, and ask sales for whatever documentation the review needs.
Data residency
Choosing a region is a legal decision here, not only a technical one
Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act, 2022 — Chapter 44 — has been in force since 1 May 2023, and the Personal Data Protection Commission has been fully operational since 3 April 2024. Controllers and processors both register with the Commission before processing, for five years at a time; the deadline for entities already trading expired on 30 April 2025.
Personal data leaves Tanzania on a permit from the Commission, backed either by adequacy in the destination country or by safeguards evidenced in an international agreement, a bilateral agreement or contractual provisions. The Regulation 20 application asks for the applicant and the recipient, the data subjects, the categories of personal data, the purpose and duration of the transfer, the destination country and entity, and the security arrangements there. The Commission may approve it, ask for more, or refuse, and monitors the conditions afterwards. That is prior authorisation from a named regulator — which is precisely the conversation a Cape Town or Frankfurt region starts, and precisely the conversation a Dar es Salaam region does not.
Deploy in tz-1a and your data is held in Dar es Salaam, under Tanzanian law, where your regulator can see it: data residency for Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act. Compliance stays yours as the controller. What the region decides is where the disk is, and in this country that is the question everything else hangs off.
Multi-region, deliberately
ke-1a in Nairobi and ng-1a in Lagos sit on the same account and the same API, which makes standby, replication and disaster recovery a configuration rather than a project. Just be intentional with personal data: a replica in Nairobi or Lagos is a transfer out of Tanzania and engages the permit regime above. Application images, non-personal telemetry and static assets do not.
Where public-sector work sits
Public institutions are directed to the government-approved hosting environment coordinated by the e-Government Authority, so ministries are not this page's audience. The private layer around them is: contractors and system integrators, NGOs delivering government-funded programmes, and firms that have to submit data into government systems and would rather do it from inside the country.
Who runs here
What Tanzanian teams deploy into tz-1a
Network operators
Four mobile networks, a state backbone operator and enterprise carriers including SimbaNET, Habari Node and Liquid cluster around the exchange in Dar es Salaam. RADIUS and AAA, recursive resolvers and authoritative DNS, mail relays, billing and provisioning portals, IPAM, NetFlow collectors, looking-glass and speed-test nodes that mean nothing unless they sit where the network is. Small instances, several of them, each built to size at TZS 8,660 a core.
Donor programmes and NGOs
TANGO alone counts more than 485 member organisations, and the large international programmes run country operations from Dar es Salaam. DHIS2 and other health and M&E platforms, KoBoToolbox and ODK form servers collecting field submissions over mobile data, file sync for teams working offline upcountry, donor reporting dashboards, ERPNext or Odoo for grant accounting. Beneficiary records are personal data, which puts the residency block above at the centre of the purchase — and the grant year makes annual billing the natural term.
Ports, transit and freight
Dar es Salaam is the transit gateway for six land-linked countries and the Standard Gauge Railway is reshaping inland movement. Transport management and freight-forwarding platforms, customs and TANCIS integration middleware, GPS and telematics ingest from truck fleets, EDI, container tracking portals. Telemetry ingest is continuous, high-volume and unglamorous — a workload that wants to be next door and wants its traffic unmetered.
Mining and its contractors
Gold is the country's largest export earner, at USD 4,968.4 million in 2025. The buyer is frequently the service contractor rather than the mine: site-to-cloud aggregation from remote operations over thin links, geological and survey data stores, contractor management, HSE compliance systems, procurement portals. Storage-heavy, so the per-GB SSD rate matters more than the core count.
Financial services and fintech
Agent-banking backends, USSD gateways, KYC document stores, reconciliation and settlement jobs running against TIPS, reporting into the Bank of Tanzania. Regulated, personal-data-heavy, and audited — the segment where an origin inside Tanzania answers three separate questions at once.
Agencies, ISVs and resellers
Dar es Salaam holds 66.5% of Tanzanian startups, concentrated on the Ali Hassan Mwinyi Road corridor. Client sites, staging environments, reseller stacks, Git runners, client mail — bought repeatedly, resold onward, and sized by the resource rather than by the plan, which is why a per-vCPU price list beats a tier ladder for this buyer.
Tourism and hospitality
2.29 million international arrivals and USD 3.9 billion in travel receipts in 2025, operated largely from Arusha and Zanzibar. Booking engines, channel managers, property management integrations, safari operator CRMs. Guests browse from overseas, so pair a Dar es Salaam origin with a CDN — while the staff, rates and reservations systems that are used all day, every day, stay close to the people using them.
Migrating
Moving a workload into Dar es Salaam
From a global cloud
Three things change and none of them are the console. The origin moves into Tanzania, which takes an ocean or a border out of every request your Tanzanian users make and closes the gap the missing CDN presence leaves open. The price moves into shillings, which removes the exchange-rate drift between the day you sized the instance and the day the invoice is paid, plus the card issuer's margin on top of it. And the residency question stops being a cross-border transfer analysis for the data that stays here. The migration itself is the ordinary one: build the instance, sync the data, dual-run for a day, move the DNS.
From a local host
There are capable Tanzanian hosts, and location is not the difference. The difference is the shape of the product. Cloud servers priced by the resource rather than by the tier, so you buy the machine you need and change it in place. An API and a CLI, snapshots and scheduled backups, private networking, independent resize of vCPU, RAM and storage. A published 99.9% uptime SLA with service credits. And object storage, dedicated hardware, colocation and two further regions available on the same account the day the workload outgrows a single box.
One question separates a Tanzanian cloud from a Tanzania-branded one: which building is the machine in, and in which country is that building? Ask it of every provider you shortlist, including this one. The answer here is tz-1a, Dar es Salaam.
FAQ
Questions, answered
None — they're the same product. "Cloud Server" is our name for the virtual machine; the Linux VPS and Windows VPS pages are just that server viewed by operating system. Pick whichever entry point suits you.
Yes. Choose your operating system at deploy time. Linux images (Ubuntu, Debian, Rocky, AlmaLinux) are free; Windows Server adds a license fee from $8/month that scales with the size of your server — the calculator shows the exact figure for your configuration.
Your server is the sum of its parts: $4.33 per vCPU, $3.06 per GB of RAM, $0.25 per GB of SSD storage, and $1.50 per public IPv4, each per month. IPv6 is free. There are no fixed plans — change any dial independently.
Yes. Scale vCPU, RAM, and storage up as you grow, with minimal downtime — every resource moves independently, so you never pay for a bundle you don't need.
Under 60 seconds. Your instance provisions and runs any setup you provide, so it's ready to use — not just powered on.
Yes. Every action — create, resize, snapshot, destroy — is available through a clean API and command-line tool, so you can manage infrastructure as code.
Every instance supports on-demand snapshots and scheduled automated backups. Snapshot storage is billed per GB beyond your included allowance.
Yes. Our team assists with moving existing workloads into Lineserve at no extra charge. Reach out to support to plan the move.
In tz-1a, our Dar es Salaam region. The instance and its storage are created there and stay there unless you deploy elsewhere yourself.
No. Amazon's African region is Cape Town, with a local zone in Johannesburg, and Microsoft's is in South Africa. The published African CDN points of presence are Cape Town, Johannesburg, Nairobi, Lagos and Mombasa — none of them in Tanzania. A Dar es Salaam business on a global cloud is served from another country.
From TZS 27,780 a month for 1 vCPU, 1 GB of RAM, 20 GB of SSD and one IPv4. After that it is TZS 8,660 per vCPU, TZS 6,120 per GB of RAM, TZS 500 per GB of Universal SSD and TZS 3,000 per additional IPv4, each per month. IPv6 is free and prices exclude VAT.
1 to 32 vCPU, 1 to 128 GB of RAM, and storage from 20 GB on Linux or 32 GB on Windows up to 16 TB, with up to eight IPv4 addresses. Each dimension resizes independently with minimal downtime, so you size for today and grow the same machine.
In Tanzanian Shillings, by M-Pesa and other mobile money, bank transfer, or card. No foreign card and no forex conversion is required.
No. Displayed prices exclude VAT. Mainland VAT on digital and electronic services is 18%, and it is calculated and shown separately at checkout.
Send [email protected] your TIN, your registered name as the TRA holds it and any purchase-order reference before you build the first server, and they appear on every invoice from the first billing run. Tanzanian input-VAT recovery turns on the document carrying the right identifiers and a verification code under EFD protocol 2.1, so confirm the treatment of the purchase with your tax adviser as well.
A Tanzanian business paying a non-resident for services withholds 15% of the gross consideration unless a double tax agreement reduces it, irrespective of where the service is performed. Whether that applies to your purchase is a question for your tax adviser; ask [email protected] for the documentation the review needs.
Yes. Windows Server 2019, 2022 and 2025 Standard are available, licensed per vCPU on a minimum of four cores from TZS 4,000 per vCPU and billed in shillings alongside the compute. Linux images are free, with root and SSH from first boot on current Ubuntu, Debian, Rocky, AlmaLinux, CentOS Stream and Fedora.
Under 60 seconds, from the console, the API or the CLI. Snapshots, resize and destroy run the same way, so a whole environment can be described in code and rebuilt on demand.
Yes. Data in tz-1a is held in Dar es Salaam and is not moved out of the country without your instruction — data residency for Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act.
Compliance is yours as the controller: registration with the Commission, your lawful basis, your breach procedures. What in-country hosting removes is the cross-border transfer question for the data that stays here — and in Tanzania that question is a permit application decided by the Commission, not a self-assessment.
Yes — ke-1a in Nairobi and ng-1a in Lagos are on the same account and API, billed on the same shilling invoice. Be deliberate with personal data: moving it out of Tanzania is a cross-border transfer under the PDPA and engages the Commission's permit regime.
They reach Dar es Salaam over the National ICT Broadband Backbone rather than over an international path — 13,820 km of state fibre reaching every region of Tanzania. That is why one origin in Dar es Salaam covers upcountry users without a second region, and why a Cape Town region cannot make the same claim.
NVMe-backed storage, a 1 Gbps port with unlimited local traffic, private networking in the region, on-demand snapshots and scheduled backups, always-on DDoS mitigation, a browser console, and a full API and CLI. No bandwidth charge, no support tier, no per-request billing.
The contracting entity is LINESERVE, INC. What is in Tanzania is the infrastructure — region tz-1a in Dar es Salaam — plus billing in shillings and a Tanzanian line on +255 761 847 121.
Yes: +255 761 847 121 or [email protected]. Tanzania runs on East Africa Time year-round with no daylight saving, so a call placed in a Dar es Salaam working day is a call inside working hours.
Deploy your first Cloud Server in under 60 seconds
Linux or Windows, 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