tz-1a — Dar es Salaam
Where your data lives in Tanzania
tz-1a is a Dar es Salaam region — compute, storage and the network endpoint in the commercial capital, in the same city as Tanzania's subsea cable landings, its internet exchange and the head end of the national backbone. Nothing between your users and your application has to leave the country, and your data sits under Tanzanian law where your regulator can see it. Nairobi and Lagos 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.
Dar es Salaam
Tanzania · tz-1a
~6 ms
typical, within metro
in-country region
Nairobi
Kenya · ke-1a
~2 ms
typical, within metro
in-country region
Lagos
Nigeria · ng-1a
~4 ms
typical, within metro
in-country region
Network
Everything Tanzanian traffic needs is in one city, and that is where tz-1a is
Tanzania's international capacity comes ashore at Dar es Salaam. SEACOM, EASSy and SEAS all land there — SEAS sharing the EASSy branch at the Dar es Salaam cable landing station — and Dar es Salaam is one of 2Africa's named landing points. Tanga and Zanzibar take landings too. This is unusual and worth sitting with: in most of the region the capacity arrives in a port city and is then hauled hundreds of kilometres inland to wherever the servers and the customers are. In Tanzania the port city is the commercial capital. The cable, the exchange, the backbone head end and tz-1a are all inside the same metro.
Tanzanian networks hand traffic to each other in Dar es Salaam, at TIX. The Tanzania Internet eXchange has run since 2003 as a project of TISPA, the country's ISP association, and PeeringDB lists 32 networks, 33 connections and 798G of connected capacity at roughly 90% IPv6 — Akamai at 200G, Meta and TTCL at 100G each, Cloudflare at 30G, Liquid at 10G. Peering there is free: no port fee, no cross-connect fee, no membership fee. TISPA runs five more exchanges upcountry, in Arusha, Dodoma, Mbeya, Mwanza and Zanzibar, and puts aggregate traffic across the six above 100 Gbps. The whole design intent is to keep Tanzanian traffic inside Tanzania.
Beyond the metro, the National ICT Broadband Backbone carries the rest. It is government fibre managed by TTCL — 13,820 km laid against a 16,280 km target as of FY2024/25, with TZS 73 billion allocated to extend it in FY2025/26 — reaching every region of the country and crossing into Zambia, Malawi, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. A single origin in Dar es Salaam therefore serves Mwanza, Arusha, Dodoma, Mbeya and the inland corridors over domestic fibre, which is a different resilience story from a coastal cable and a long inland haul. It is also why one region covers Tanzania rather than one region per city.
Then the users. TCRA counted 111.9 million telecom subscriptions in the quarter to March 2026, at 159.8% penetration, across Vodacom at 36.19 million, Yas at 31.85 million, Airtel Tanzania at 23.75 million, Halotel at 18.32 million and TTCL at 1.80 million — no operator above 32.3%, which is a genuinely four-way market. Internet subscriptions were 58.9 million at 84.2% penetration, mobile wireless is about 99% of all connections, 4G reaches 94.2% of the population and smartphone penetration is 42.5%. Your visitor is on a mid-range Android on a cell, on one of four networks, and tz-1a is a domestic destination for all four at once.
798G
Capacity connected at TIX, Dar es Salaam (PeeringDB)
13,820 km
National backbone fibre laid (NICTBB, FY2024/25)
58.9M
Internet subscriptions — 84.2% penetration (TCRA, Q1 2026)
6
TISPA internet exchanges across Tanzania
The gap on the map
The nearest full cloud regions to Tanzania are in Cape Town and South Africa, and the published African edge locations of the large content networks sit in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Nairobi, Lagos and Mombasa. None in Tanzania. A cache in Mombasa or Nairobi is a foreign hop for a Dar es Salaam user and a border crossing for the data, which is exactly the hole a Dar es Salaam origin fills.
Content networks are already here
Akamai, Meta and Cloudflare all connect at TIX, and SEACOM operates a Google cache there according to TIX's own materials. So the video, the software updates and the third-party APIs your application depends on are being served over Tanzanian interconnection, not only over the cables. An origin in the same city as that fabric is in the right place.
What to ask before you sign anything
Which city is the machine in, and is the provider willing to name it? Under which country's law does the data sit? What does the uptime SLA pay out when it is missed, and who has to claim it? Those three answers decide more about your service than any specification sheet, and they can be checked from a laptop in Dar es Salaam with a traceroute.
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.
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
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
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
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
Taking personal data out of Tanzania needs a permit first
Region choice in Tanzania is a legal decision before it is a performance one. The 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 register with the Commission before processing, five years at a time; the deadline for entities already trading passed on 30 April 2025.
The clause that decides where your servers go is the cross-border one. Personal data leaves Tanzania on a permit from the Commission, supported either by adequacy in the destination country or by safeguards evidenced in an international agreement, a bilateral agreement or contractual provisions. The application asks for the applicant and the recipient, the data subjects, the categories of data, the purpose and duration, the destination country and entity, and the security arrangements at the other end. The Commission may approve it, ask for more, or refuse — and it keeps watching the conditions afterwards. That is prior authorisation, and it runs on the regulator's timetable rather than your sprint schedule. Keep the data in tz-1a and the question does not arise for it.
The penalties are published
Administrative penalties under the Act reach TZS 100,000,000, and criminal fines run to TZS 5,000,000,000 for corporations. A regime that publishes figures like those is one whose questions turn up in due diligence, donor audits and bank onboarding — usually at the point where the deal is nearly done and the answer needs to already be true.
A second region is a decision, not a default
Nairobi and Lagos are one API call away and excellent for standby, backups and redundancy. Make the call deliberately: putting personal data about Tanzanians into ke-1a or ng-1a is a transfer out of the country, and that is the permit conversation above. Application images, static assets and logs carrying no personal data raise nothing of the sort, and they are usually the bulk of what you want replicated anyway.
What tz-1a supplies is location: data residency for Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act, with your data held in Dar es Salaam and not moved out of the country without your instruction. Registration and your duties as a controller stay with you.
Who chooses a region on purpose
The workloads that pick Dar es Salaam first and design around it
For plenty of applications the region is an afterthought. For these, it is the constraint that everything else was fitted around.
ISPs, WISPs and network operators
RADIUS and AAA, recursive resolvers and authoritative zones, mail relays, billing and provisioning portals, NetFlow collectors, Zabbix and LibreNMS, looking-glass and speed-test endpoints, IPAM. Four mobile networks, a state backbone operator and a set of enterprise ISPs all cluster around TIX, and the people running these systems will read a traceroute before they read a page. Small instances, several at a time.
NGOs and donor programmes
The heaviest single segment in the Tanzanian buyer mix — TANGO alone counts over 485 member organisations, and the large international programmes run country operations from Dar es Salaam. Health and monitoring platforms, form servers taking submissions from field teams on mobile data, file sync for staff working offline for days at a time, grant accounting, reporting dashboards. Beneficiary data is personal data, which puts the cross-border clause directly in the architecture conversation.
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 systems, customs and TANCIS integration middleware, telematics ingest from truck fleets, EDI, container tracking portals refreshed all day by clients and drivers. Telematics is an unglamorous stream of small writes from Tanzanian roads — the workload that hates a long path most.
Financial services and fintech
Agent-banking backends, USSD gateways, KYC document stores, reconciliation and settlement jobs, reporting into the Bank of Tanzania. Sensitive personal data, auditable invoices and a supervisor entitled to ask where the records are held: this segment cares about the region, the law and the paperwork at the same time, which is why it tends to decide the region before the instance size.
Mining and its contractors
Gold is the country's largest export earner, and the hosting buyer is very often the service contractor rather than the mine itself. Site-to-cloud aggregation from remote operations on thin links, geological and survey data stores, contractor and HSE compliance systems, procurement portals. A Dar es Salaam region keeps the upload path domestic from the site all the way to the disk.
Agencies, ISVs and resellers
Dar es Salaam holds 66.5% of Tanzanian startups, clustered along the Ali Hassan Mwinyi Road corridor. Multi-tenant client hosting, staging environments, control-panel stacks, Git-based deploys, client mail. Their clients increasingly ask which country their site is in, and having a straight answer closes the conversation instead of opening one.
Choosing
Two ways buyers arrive at tz-1a
From South Africa, Europe or a US region
The move is routine work: provision, sync, dump and restore the database, run both for a day, cut the DNS. What changes afterwards is every request a Tanzanian user makes — the path stops running down the coast and across an ocean, and stays on domestic infrastructure instead. The commercial side changes with it. You are quoted, invoiced and settled in shillings, so the figure finance approved in March is the figure that clears in November, and there is a Tanzanian number to call at 02:00 rather than a queue several time zones west.
From a Tanzania-branded product hosted elsewhere
Several products marketed for this country are served from Johannesburg or Europe with a Tanzanian name on the front. That is a legitimate way to sell hosting, and it is your job to know which one you bought, because it decides how far your customers' packets travel and which country's law your data sits 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 tz-1a, Dar es Salaam.
You can check any of this yourself in a minute. Traceroute from a Tanzanian connection and watch where the path terminates, then run it again from outside the country and compare. Look up which networks announce the address. A claim about location survives that test or it does not.
FAQ
Questions, answered
In Dar es Salaam. Compute, storage and the region's network endpoint are all in the city, and an instance created there stays there unless you move it yourself.
SEACOM, EASSy and SEAS come ashore there — SEAS co-located with the EASSy branch at the Dar es Salaam cable landing station — and Dar es Salaam is one of 2Africa's named landing points. Tanga and Zanzibar have landings as well. Tanzania's international capacity therefore arrives in the same city as tz-1a rather than several hundred kilometres away.
Traceroute to it from a Tanzanian connection and watch where the path ends, then repeat from a network outside the country and compare the shape of the two. Look the address up and see which networks announce it. Do it before you migrate, not after.
No. The nearest full regions are in Cape Town and South Africa, and the published African edge locations of the large content networks sit in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Nairobi, Lagos and Mombasa. A Tanzanian user reaching any of those is reaching another country. That gap is the reason a Dar es Salaam region exists.
They reach Dar es Salaam over the National ICT Broadband Backbone — 13,820 km of state fibre reaching every region of the country — rather than over an international path. That is why one origin in Dar es Salaam covers Tanzania without a second region upcountry.
At TIX in Dar es Salaam, run since 2003 by TISPA. PeeringDB lists 32 networks, 33 connections and 798G of connected capacity there, at roughly 90% IPv6, with Akamai, Meta, Cloudflare, TTCL and Liquid among the participants. Five more TISPA exchanges cover Arusha, Dodoma, Mbeya, Mwanza and Zanzibar.
Yes. Every instance gets a dedicated public IPv4 address and a free /64 IPv6 block. Tanzanian interconnection runs at roughly 90% IPv6 adoption, so v6 here is a working default rather than a future project.
Yes. Dar es Salaam, Nairobi and Lagos are one account, one API and one bill. Treat personal data carefully when you replicate: a copy of Tanzanian personal data in ke-1a or ng-1a is a transfer out of the country under the Personal Data Protection Act, and that needs a permit from the Commission. Application images, static assets and non-personal logs raise no such question.
No — registration and the controller obligations belong to you, in whichever country the server sits. What the region gives you is residency: the data is held in Tanzania, under Tanzanian law, so the cross-border permit regime has nothing to act on for it.
Cloud servers and VPS on Linux or Windows, dedicated servers, and S3-compatible object storage on the tz-1a.s3.lineserve.net endpoint. Colocation in Dar es Salaam is quoted rather than listed — send your rack, power and cross-connect requirements to [email protected].
A published 99.9% uptime SLA, with always-on DDoS mitigation on every instance, on-demand snapshots and scheduled backups. Ask any provider what their SLA pays out when it is missed and whether the customer has to claim it — the remedy matters more than the number.
TZS. Prices can be viewed in USD, KES, TZS or NGN, but a Tanzanian customer is quoted, invoiced and settled in shillings, with 18% VAT calculated and shown at checkout. Payment is by M-Pesa, bank transfer or card.
Yes: +255 761 847 121, alongside [email protected] and the ticket system. Tanzania is on East Africa Time all year with no daylight saving, so business hours mean the same thing in every month.