Linux VPS — hosted in Dar es Salaam
Linux VPS Hosting in Tanzania
Full root in Dar es Salaam, priced in shillings.
Ubuntu, Debian, Rocky, AlmaLinux, CentOS Stream or Fedora on NVMe storage, with your SSH key loaded and cloud-init finished before you have opened a terminal. Every plan carries full root, a dedicated IPv4 and a free /64 of IPv6, in a Dar es Salaam region called tz-1a. From TZS 43,900 a month — a shilling figure off a shilling price list, so the number you budget in October is the number you pay in March.
- Full root and SSH keys on every plan
- Six distributions, or bring your own ISO
- Quoted and billed in TZS — no dollar card, no conversion
- Data residency for Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act — your data stays in-country
- Free DDoS protection · 99.9% uptime SLA
No credit card required · Local billing in KES, TZS & NGN
Pricing
Simple plans, billed in your currency
Pay in local currency — no cards, no forex surprises. Every plan is full root, full network, no throttling. Annual billing gets you two months free.
Linux VPS – 2 GB RAM
Small workloads and personal projects.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos
- 1 vCPU
- 2 GB RAM
- 40 GB SSD
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
Linux VPS – 4 GB RAM
Web servers and small databases.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos
- 2 vCPU
- 4 GB RAM
- 80 GB SSD
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
Linux VPS – 8 GB RAM
Production web applications.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos
- 4 vCPU
- 8 GB RAM
- 160 GB SSD
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
Linux VPS – 16 GB RAM
High-traffic applications.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos
- 8 vCPU
- 16 GB RAM
- 320 GB SSD
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
Linux VPS – 32 GB RAM
Enterprise applications.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos
- 16 vCPU
- 32 GB RAM
- 640 GB SSD
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
Linux VPS – 64 GB RAM
Massive workloads and consolidation.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos
- 32 vCPU
- 64 GB RAM
- 1280 GB SSD
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
Prices exclude VAT. Local currency figures are indicative and settled at checkout. Need more cores or memory? Talk to Sales.
Weighing up Windows too? Compare all Linux & Windows plans on the VPS Hosting page.
Network
Put the origin in the city your users are in
Tanzania browses on a phone. The TCRA counts 58.9 million internet subscriptions, 84.2% penetration, with mobile wireless carrying roughly 99% of every internet connection in the country and smartphone penetration at 42.5%. The person hitting your Laravel app is on a mid-range Android over mobile data, not a desktop on fibre. You control none of that last mile. You control all of the first byte — time to first byte is what an origin server decides, and an origin in Dar es Salaam decides it from inside Tanzania.
Those users arrive on four networks with no majority holder: Vodacom on 36.19 million subscriptions, Yas on 31.85 million, Airtel on 23.75 million and Halotel on 18.32 million, out of 111.9 million in total. That is a country you plan breadth for rather than one carrier relationship. Tanzania built for exactly that — TIX in Dar es Salaam has been the national exchange since 2003, and TISPA runs five more upcountry in Arusha, Dodoma, Mbeya, Mwanza and Zanzibar. Tanzanian networks meet each other in Dar es Salaam. So does tz-1a.
All of Tanzania's international capacity comes ashore on the coast: SEACOM and EASSy both land at Dar es Salaam, and everything leaving the country goes to sea. Traffic that never leaves has no reason to. A request from a handset in Kinondoni to an application in Dar es Salaam is a domestic journey from end to end. Hosted in Frankfurt, that same request is a trip under the Indian Ocean and back — on every uncached byte, on every page, all day.
58.9M
Internet subscriptions in Tanzania (TCRA, Q1 2026)
~99%
Of Tanzanian internet connections are mobile wireless
798G
Connected capacity at TIX, Dar es Salaam (PeeringDB)
6
TISPA internet exchanges, Dar es Salaam plus five upcountry
TIX, and the five exchanges upcountry
The Tanzania Internet eXchange has run in Dar es Salaam since 2003 as a TISPA project. PeeringDB records 32 peer networks, 33 connections and 798G of connected capacity, with about 90% IPv6 adoption, and Akamai, Meta, Cloudflare, TTCL and Liquid all present. Peering there costs nothing — no port fee, no cross-connect fee, no membership fee — which is why the aggregate across TISPA's six exchanges now runs above 100 Gbps. Tanzania has spent twenty years building somewhere for its own traffic to meet.
The origin and the CDN do different jobs
A CDN caches bytes that are already computed. An origin computes the ones that are not — the logged-in dashboard, the search result, the checkout, the API call. Cache what you can and put the rest in Dar es Salaam. If a real share of your audience is overseas, as a safari operator's is, keep the CDN in front and move the origin, the database and the admin panel here. The two are complements, and a page that tells you to choose is selling you one of them.
Payments
Four wallets, one currency
Ask a Dar es Salaam developer which wallet they use and you get four different answers. M-Pesa — Vodacom Tanzania's, with its own regulator and its own rails, not Kenya's — holds 40.97% of the country's mobile money accounts. Mixx by Yas holds 31.02%, Airtel Money 17.79%, HaloPesa most of the remainder. Across 80.98 million registered accounts and 1.99 billion transactions in a single quarter, nobody owns this market. The one thing all of it settles in is the shilling, and that is what you are billed in.
M-Pesa
Pay in TZS from a Vodacom Tanzania M-Pesa wallet. The amount you approve on the handset is the amount on the invoice — nothing converts, nothing lands on a statement as a foreign transaction, and no bank adds a foreign-transaction fee to it. Tanzanian VAT at 18% is added at checkout.
Bank transfer
The rail once a finance department is involved. An annual commitment across a fleet of client instances, or a dedicated server alongside them, runs past what a wallet is built to push in one go — and a transfer gives your accounts payable something to file.
Card
Visa and Mastercard, charged in shillings, if that is how your team prefers to buy. Tanzanian card use is weighted heavily towards the ATM rather than the checkout, so the card sits third on this list — deliberately, and not because it works any less well.
What's included
Everything on every plan
No feature tiers, no upsell traps. Every Linux VPS ships with the full stack — you only choose how much compute you need.
Full root & SSH
Complete root access and SSH key auth from first boot. It's your server, all of it.
Any Linux distro
Ubuntu, Debian, Rocky, AlmaLinux, and Fedora, with more images added regularly.
NVMe SSD storage
Enterprise NVMe drives for fast boot, quick builds, and low-latency databases.
Free DDoS protection
Always-on network-layer mitigation included on every plan at no extra cost.
Cloud-init ready
Bootstrap your server on deploy with cloud-init user data — no manual first-run setup.
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.
IPv4 & IPv6
A dedicated IPv4 address plus native IPv6 included on every instance.
API & CLI
Automate everything through a clean API and command-line tool. Infrastructure as code, natively.
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
Your stack, your way
Pick your distro. Build it your way.
Start from a clean, current base image and take it wherever you need. No forced defaults, no bloat — just the distribution you already know.
- Deploy Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS Stream, Rocky, AlmaLinux, or Fedora, all kept current.
- Choose your image at deploy time, or bring your own with a custom ISO.
- Cloud-init runs your setup on first boot — packages, users, and keys, done.
- Rebuild to a different distro whenever you want on a fresh instance.
Available images
Updated regularly
Deep dive: Ubuntu VPS · Debian VPS · CentOS Stream VPS · Rocky Linux VPS · AlmaLinux VPS · Fedora VPS
Use cases
Built for the way you run Linux
Web apps & APIs
Run Node, Python, Go, PHP, or Ruby behind Nginx with room to grow.
Docker & containers
A clean host for Docker, Compose, and lightweight Kubernetes, close to your users.
Databases
Self-host PostgreSQL, MySQL, or Redis on fast NVMe with the RAM real workloads need.
CI runners & dev boxes
Spin up build runners, staging environments, and disposable dev servers on demand.
How it works
Live in three steps
Choose region & image
Pick Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, or Lagos, then your distro and compute size.
Deploy in under 60 seconds
We provision your server and run your cloud-init — no manual setup.
Connect over SSH
Log in with your SSH key and full root. Your server is ready to build on.
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 121Sales
[email protected]Why Lineserve
Decided on what actually matters here
Tax & invoicing
The quote, the invoice and the bank statement all say TZS
Tanzania settled the currency question in law. The Finance Act 2024 amended the Bank of Tanzania Act, and GN 198 of 2025 brought the rule into force on 28 March 2025: goods and services inside Tanzania are quoted, advertised and paid in Tanzanian Shillings. Every domestic supplier you deal with now prices that way. A hosting line in dollars is the odd row in the ledger — the one that moves between the quotation, the invoice and the debit, and the one nobody can pin down in October for a year that starts in January.
The Tanzanian price list is written in shillings from the start. The 2 GB plan is TZS 43,900 a month, the 4 GB plan is TZS 84,800, the 8 GB plan is TZS 166,600, the 64 GB plan is TZS 1,311,800. Those are set figures in TZS, not a dollar price pushed through whatever rate applies on the afternoon you check out. Annual billing runs ten months for twelve, which fixes the line item for a full budget year at a fifth off.
Mainland VAT is 18% and it applies to digital and electronic services, administered by the TRA; Zanzibar administers its own VAT separately through the Zanzibar Revenue Authority. Displayed prices exclude VAT and 18% is added at checkout, so the plan card is the net figure that goes into the budget line.
For an agency billing clients
One buyer, many sites, and every one of them sized to its own job instead of crammed onto a single overloaded box: the 2 GB plan at TZS 43,900 for a brochure site, the 4 GB plan at TZS 84,800 for a WooCommerce store doing real trade, the 8 GB plan at TZS 166,600 where the database has grown teeth. Each is a shilling number you can put straight onto a client retainer without a conversion sitting in the middle of your margin.
Talk to [email protected] about your invoicing requirements before you order — annual terms, purchase orders, or a single account across a set of client instances.
Data residency
Tanzania asks permission before data leaves
The Personal Data Protection Act, 2022 came into force on 1 May 2023, and the Personal Data Protection Commission has been fully operational since April 2024. Controllers and processors register with the Commission, and registration runs five years. So far that reads like every other data law on the continent.
The cross-border provision does not. Personal data leaves Tanzania on a permit, applied for in advance under Regulation 20 — naming the recipient, the categories of data, the purpose and duration of the transfer, the destination country and the security arrangements there — and the Commission may approve it, ask for more, or refuse, then monitor the conditions afterwards. This is prior authorisation, not a self-assessment you write up and keep on file. Administrative penalties run to TZS 100 million.
That turns where you put the database into an architectural decision rather than a preference. A Postgres volume in Dar es Salaam holding household survey responses, patient identifiers, cooperative member records or a customer table never raises the transfer question, because nothing is transferred. Put the same table in Frankfurt and the question is live from the first row.
What sits inside the boundary on a Linux instance
The root volume, the database, the uploads directory, the log files with the IP addresses in them, and whatever else your application writes to disk. Your data is held in Dar es Salaam and stays in Tanzania unless you instruct otherwise — which matters most for the parts of a system nobody maps, because personal data has a habit of turning up in the ones nobody mapped.
Registration is yours. Location is ours.
Your own registration with the Commission as a controller or processor travels with you regardless of where the server is. What location decides is the transfer question, and in Dar es Salaam it does not arise. That is the version your counsel can actually work with: a fact about where the disk is, checkable in an afternoon.
Data residency for Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act, with your data held in Dar es Salaam.
Who runs here
The Linux workloads Dar es Salaam actually runs
Digital agencies and the .tz long tail
Dar es Salaam hosts 66.5% of Tanzanian startups, most of them within about four kilometres of each other on the Ali Hassan Mwinyi Road corridor. The work is WordPress and Laravel client sites, staging environments, CyberPanel or Plesk stacks, Git runners and client mail — one buyer, many machines, bought again every quarter. This is the highest-value segment per sales hour in the country, and it is the one that resells.
NGOs and donor programmes
Proportionally heavier in Tanzania's buyer mix than anywhere near it; TANGO alone counts over 485 member organisations, and the international programmes run their country operations out of Dar es Salaam. The stack is Linux end to end: ODK Central and KoboToolbox form servers taking field submissions, DHIS2, Nextcloud for teams that are offline half the week, M&E dashboards, ERPNext or Odoo for grant accounting. Beneficiary data is personal data, which puts this segment straight onto the block above.
ISPs, WISPs and telco resellers
Four mobile networks, a state backbone operator and a set of enterprise ISPs, most of them clustered at TIX. 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. These workloads are meaningless outside the country they serve, and these buyers read a traceroute before they read a paragraph.
Mobile money and fintech engineering
Callback receivers, USSD gateway back ends, reconciliation and settlement jobs, KYC document stores, agent-network dashboards. The requests originate on Tanzanian networks and the reporting goes to Tanzanian institutions, so the endpoint in the middle belongs in Tanzania. A webhook that cold-starts across an ocean is a webhook that gets retried.
Ports, transit and logistics
Dar es Salaam is the gateway for six land-linked countries and the Standard Gauge Railway is rewriting how freight moves inland from it. Freight-forwarding and transport management systems, customs integration middleware, GPS and telematics ingest from truck fleets, EDI, container-tracking portals. The operators are in Dar es Salaam and the trucks are on Tanzanian roads; the ingest endpoint should not be in Virginia.
Tourism, with the origin here and the CDN in front
Booking engines, channel managers, property-management integrations and safari operator CRMs, run out of Arusha and Zanzibar. The architecture worth stating plainly: the guests browsing are mostly overseas, so cache the public site at the edge — and keep the origin, the reservations database and the back office in Dar es Salaam, where the people typing into them are.
Agriculture and agri-export
Coffee, tea, cashew, clove and tobacco cooperatives run membership and payout systems, traceability, warehouse receipt systems and buyer portals. Traffic tracks the harvest calendar rather than a smooth monthly curve — an argument for a machine you resize in September and resize back in February, rather than a fixed box sized for one week of the year.
Migrating
Moving from where you are now
From a European or US budget VPS
You bought it because it was cheap and the API was good, and both of those were true. What it costs you is distance and currency. Every uncached request from a Tanzanian visitor crosses an ocean and comes back; every invoice crosses a currency and comes back a different size. The move itself is a morning: drop the TTL to 300 the day before, rsync the document root, dump and restore the database, change the A record, watch the logs. Afterwards the origin is in the same city as the people using it and the line item is in the same currency as your revenue. Keep the CDN if you have overseas visitors — you are moving the origin, not replacing the edge.
From shared hosting or a reseller panel
The reason to leave shared hosting is rarely the price. It is that you have outgrown somebody else's php.ini. On a VPS you pick the PHP or Python version, run a cron job that genuinely runs, keep a queue worker alive, put Redis next to the database, and deploy with a push instead of an upload. You inherit the updates in exchange, which is the honest half of the trade. What you gain is a machine sized to the job — the 2 GB plan at TZS 43,900 for the brochure site, the 8 GB plan at TZS 166,600 for the store that outgrew the shared box — and a resize when the job changes, rather than another migration. Install whichever panel your team already knows, on a machine you have root on.
Ask any host you are weighing up, this one included: where is the machine physically, what does the SLA pay when it misses, and which currency does the invoice arrive in. Then choose on the answers.
FAQ
Questions, answered
Yes. Every Linux VPS gives you complete root access and SSH key authentication from the moment it boots. It's your server to configure however you like.
You can deploy Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS Stream, Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, or Fedora at launch, all kept current. You can also bring your own image with a custom ISO.
Yes. Resize to a larger plan as your workload grows, with minimal downtime. Compute and storage scale together across the tiers.
Under 60 seconds. Your server provisions and runs any cloud-init user data you provide, so it's ready to use — not just powered on.
Yes. Our team assists with moving existing Linux workloads into Lineserve at no extra charge. Reach out to support to plan the move.
Every plan supports on-demand snapshots and scheduled automated backups. Snapshot storage is billed per GB beyond your included allowance.
Yes. Every instance includes native IPv6 alongside a dedicated IPv4 address, at no extra cost.
In tz-1a, our Dar es Salaam region. The instance is created there and stays there until you move it.
A real shilling price. The TZS figures come from our own per-currency price list and are set in shillings — they are not derived from a dollar amount at the moment you pay, so the same plan costs the same next month.
Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS Stream, Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux and Fedora, all kept current, or a custom ISO you upload. Switching distribution means a fresh instance rather than an in-place change.
Yes, on every plan, with SSH key or password authentication and console access as a fallback for the times you lock yourself out of SSH. cloud-init runs on first boot, so packages, users and keys can be in place before your first login.
Yes, in TZS. This is Vodacom Tanzania's M-Pesa — a separate operator under a separate regulator from the Kenyan service of the same name, with its own wallet on your handset.
Both. M-Pesa, bank transfer and card are the three methods for Tanzanian customers, and all three are charged in TZS. Bank transfer is the usual choice for annual commitments and anything a finance department signs off.
No. Displayed prices exclude VAT. Mainland VAT is 18% on digital and electronic services and is added at checkout.
Yes. Your instance is hosted in Dar es Salaam and your data stays in-country, giving you data residency for Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act. It is not moved out of Tanzania without your instruction.
Not for data that stays in Tanzania — the permit regime under the Personal Data Protection Act governs transferring personal data out of the country, and a server in Dar es Salaam does not transfer it anywhere. Your own registration with the Commission as a controller or processor is a separate obligation and remains yours.
The national backbone reaches every region of Tanzania from Dar es Salaam — NICTBB has 13,820 km of fibre laid against a 16,280 km target — and TISPA runs internet exchanges in five upcountry cities. A request from Mwanza to a server in Dar es Salaam is a domestic one. A request from Mwanza to a server in Frankfurt is not.
If a meaningful share of your visitors are overseas, yes. A CDN caches what is already computed; the origin computes the rest. Put the CDN at the edge and the origin in Dar es Salaam and each does the job it is good at.
Yes. A domain registered with any registrar can point anywhere — set the A record to your instance's dedicated IPv4 and, if you want it reachable over IPv6, an AAAA record into the free /64 that comes with the plan.
Yes. Plans step from 2 GB plan (1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 40 GB) at TZS 43,900 a month up to 64 GB plan (32 vCPU, 64 GB RAM, 1,280 GB) at TZS 1,311,800, and you can move up as the workload grows rather than rebuilding on a new host.
A 1 Gbps port with unlimited local traffic, one dedicated IPv4, a free /64 of IPv6, free DDoS protection and a 99.9% uptime SLA. NVMe-backed storage on every plan.
Cloud servers let you specify vCPU, RAM and storage individually instead of picking a size off a list, and dedicated servers give you the whole machine. Both are in Dar es Salaam and both are billed in TZS.
Yes — +255 761 847 121, alongside [email protected] and the ticket queue in your console. Tanzania is on East Africa Time, UTC+3, all year with no daylight saving, so a time you agree in June still means the same thing in December.
Deploy your Linux VPS in under 60 seconds
Full root, 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