Object Storage — Dar es Salaam, tz-1a
S3-Compatible Object Storage in Tanzania
S3-compatible storage that plays nice with your tools — and your budget.
A bucket is the most concrete thing a data protection regulator can point at. It has a location, it has contents, and under Tanzanian law moving those contents out of the country is a permit you apply for in advance — not a note you file afterwards. That single fact changes what an object store is worth here. Point the AWS CLI, rclone, boto3 or any S3 SDK at tz-1a.s3.lineserve.net and the objects you write are in Dar es Salaam, priced and billed in TZS, from TZS 89.25 per GB per month at scale.
- S3-compatible API — tz-1a.s3.lineserve.net
- Data residency for Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act — your data stays in-country
- Priced and billed in TZS — from TZS 156.19 per GB/month, falling with volume
- You pay for what you store — transfer in, transfer out and API requests are free
- Encrypted at rest by default, versioning and lifecycle rules, 99.9% availability SLA
No credit card required · Local billing in KES, TZS & NGN
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
Side projects and small apps.
Create a bucketGrowth
Up to 5 TB
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos
Growing products and teams.
Create a bucketBusiness
Up to 10 TB
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos
Data-heavy production workloads.
Create a bucketEnterprise
10 TB+
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos
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 Tanzanian users from Cape Town costs more than it looks
There is no large public cloud region in Tanzania. The nearest ones sit in Cape Town and Johannesburg, and the content delivery points of presence that would soften the distance sit in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Nairobi, Lagos and Mombasa — none of them in Tanzania. A Tanzanian business serving documents, photographs or site media from a bucket in one of those regions is serving its own country from abroad and paying international egress for the privilege, on every read, forever.
Egress is the line that grows quietly. Storage is a number you chose; egress is a number your users choose for you. A logistics operator whose drivers upload delivery photographs all day is billed for the upload path once and the download path every time someone in the claims office opens one. An agency serving client media off a bucket pays for each image, each visit, each month. Reading your own objects back on Lineserve object storage is not a metered line: transfer in, transfer out and API requests are free at every tier, and you pay for what you store.
The geography underneath is Tanzania's own. International capacity comes ashore at Dar es Salaam — SEACOM, EASSy and SEAS land there, and 2Africa lists Dar es Salaam among its landing points — so the landing station and the commercial capital are the same city. Inland, the National ICT Broadband Backbone carries traffic to every region on government-owned fibre, 13,820 km laid of a 16,280 km target, crossing into Zambia, Malawi, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. A bucket in Dar es Salaam reaches a programme office in Mwanza, a mine site near Mbeya and a contractor in Dodoma over Tanzanian fibre. The same files served from Europe reach them over Tanzanian fibre plus a subsea path, twice — and the subsea half is the half somebody bills.
0
Large public cloud regions in Tanzania
58.9M
Internet subscriptions in Tanzania (TCRA, March 2026)
13,820 km
National backbone fibre laid, of a 16,280 km target
Free
Transfer in, transfer out and API requests, at every tier
Where Tanzanian networks meet
TIX, the Tanzania Internet eXchange, has run in Dar es Salaam since 2003 as a project of TISPA. PeeringDB records 32 peer networks, 33 connections and 798 Gbps of connected capacity, at around 90% IPv6, with Akamai, Meta, Cloudflare, TTCL and Liquid connected. Peering there carries no port, cross-connect or membership fee. TISPA runs five more exchanges upcountry — Arusha, Dodoma, Mbeya, Mwanza and Zanzibar.
Four networks, no majority
TCRA counted 111.9 million telecom subscriptions at March 2026: Vodacom 32.3%, Yas 28.5%, Airtel 21.2%, Halotel 16.4%, TTCL 1.6%. Roughly 99% of Tanzanian internet connections are mobile wireless and smartphone penetration is 42.5%. Your users arrive on four different networks, on mid-range Android handsets, and every kilobyte you can avoid sending across an ocean is one they do not wait for.
If your audience is overseas, say so and build for it
Plenty of Tanzanian businesses — safari operators above all — serve mostly foreign visitors. The right architecture there is an origin bucket in tz-1a with a CDN in front of it. The origin keeps booking records and guest data in Tanzania; the cache handles the distance. That is a normal shape, not a compromise.
Payments
Paying for a bucket in Shillings
Tanzania's payment market has a shape of its own, and it is worth getting right rather than assuming. TCRA counts 80.98 million registered mobile money accounts and 1.99 billion transactions in a quarter — but no wallet owns the country. M-Pesa, operated here by Vodacom Tanzania, holds 40.97% of accounts; Mixx by Yas holds 31.02%, Airtel Money 17.79%, and HaloPesa most of the rest. TIPS, the Bank of Tanzania's instant payment switch, moves money between banks and wallets in real time and processed USD 11.6 billion in 2024. Card sits behind both: over 12 million cards have been issued and the overwhelming majority of card activity happens at an ATM rather than online.
M-Pesa and other mobile money
Supported for Tanzanian customers, in Shillings. A storage bill is a small recurring charge, and a wallet is the fastest route from decision to working bucket — access key issued, endpoint set, first object written.
Bank transfer
The rail a Dar es Salaam finance office reaches for on anything invoiced, and the natural choice for an annual commitment or a bucket measured in terabytes. Billed in TZS throughout, so nothing converts.
Card
Visa and Mastercard work if that is how your team buys. You are billed in TZS, so no international transaction lands on the statement and no bank adds a foreign-transaction fee on top.
Prices exclude VAT; mainland VAT of 18% is added at checkout.
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
99.9%, and a plan for the disk that dies at 02:00
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.
Tanzania
+255 761 847 121
Sales
Why Lineserve
The costs that actually add up
Pricing & invoicing
A Shilling price on a bill that grows with your data
Object storage is the charge most likely to be denominated in a foreign currency and least likely to be reviewed, because it starts small. It also grows on its own — a bucket that holds 400 GB of field submissions this year holds two terabytes of them next year, without anybody deciding anything. A monthly charge that both grows and moves with the exchange rate is the definition of a line item nobody can forecast.
Tanzania prices in Shillings for good reason. The Finance Act 2024 amended the Bank of Tanzania Act, and the implementing regulations — Government Notice 198 of 2025 — took effect on 28 March 2025: goods and services within Tanzania are priced, quoted, advertised and paid in Tanzanian Shillings, with named exemptions. Lineserve prices Tanzania in TZS, and the per-GB rate falls as your stored volume grows, so the direction of travel on a growing bucket is downwards.
The rate is tiered on total stored volume: TZS 156.19 per GB per month up to 1 TB, TZS 133.88 up to 5 TB, TZS 111.56 up to 10 TB, and TZS 89.25 above 10 TB on a custom quote. Crossing a tier boundary lowers the rate on the whole volume, billing is on average monthly usage, and transfer and API requests stay free at every tier. Prices exclude VAT; mainland VAT of 18% is added at checkout.
What your accounts department should have ready
Mainland VAT is 18% and applies to digital and electronic services, administered by the Tanzania Revenue Authority; the Zanzibar Revenue Authority administers VAT separately in Zanzibar. Have your TIN and VAT registration to hand at checkout, and tell [email protected] what your finance team needs to see on the invoice before the first one is raised.
The withholding question
A Tanzanian business paying a non-resident for services withholds 15% of the gross consideration unless a double taxation agreement reduces it, and that applies irrespective of where the service is performed. Lineserve invoices Tanzania from LINESERVE, INC. On a storage line it is a small number that recurs indefinitely, which is exactly the kind of thing worth settling with your tax adviser at account opening rather than at audit.
Tax treatment depends on your own registration and circumstances; your adviser is the one who signs off on it.
Data residency
The reason to keep the bucket in Tanzania
Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act, 2022 — Chapter 44 — took effect on 1 May 2023. Its regulator, the Personal Data Protection Commission, has been fully operational since 3 April 2024. Controllers and processors register with the Commission; registration runs five years, and the final deadline for entities already operating passed on 30 April 2025. This is a live regime with a working regulator, not a statute waiting for commencement.
The provision that decides where a bucket belongs is cross-border transfer. Personal data must not be transferred outside Tanzania except in compliance with the Act, and a transfer requires a permit from the Commission, together with either adequacy in the destination country or appropriate safeguards evidenced by an international, bilateral or contractual arrangement. The application under Regulation 20 asks for the applicant and the recipient, the data subject, the type of personal data, the purpose and duration of the transfer, the destination country and the recipient entity, and the security arrangements at the far end. The Commission may approve it, ask for more, or refuse. It monitors permit conditions afterwards.
Now read that list again with a storage bucket in mind. Type of personal data. Purpose. Duration. Destination country. Recipient entity. Security arrangements in the recipient country. A form asking those six questions is describing an object store in somebody else's jurisdiction — and it is asking before the first byte moves, not after. Write to tz-1a instead and the questions do not arise, because the data never leaves. Your objects are held in Dar es Salaam, under Tanzanian law, where your regulator can see them.
Prior permission, not self-assessment
This is where Tanzania diverges from most of the region. Elsewhere a controller commonly satisfies itself that safeguards exist and documents the reasoning. Here the Commission decides first and answers you. Administrative penalties run to TZS 100,000,000, with criminal exposure beyond that. Keeping the store in-country turns a prior authorisation into a non-event for the data inside it.
Field data is beneficiary data
If your buckets hold ODK or KoBoToolbox submissions, DHIS2 attachments, KYC documents, driver photographs or membership records, they hold personal data about identifiable Tanzanians. That is exactly the category the permit regime is written for, and it is the category most likely to sit in an object store rather than in a database — because it arrives as files.
What is yours and what is ours
Compliance belongs to you as the controller: registration, notices, lawful basis, breach reporting to the Commission. Residency is what Lineserve supplies — objects written to tz-1a are held in Dar es Salaam and are not moved out of Tanzania without your instruction. If you replicate to ke-1a in Nairobi or ng-1a in Lagos for disaster recovery, that copy is a transfer, and the permit regime applies to it.
Who stores here
What Tanzanian teams keep in tz-1a
Donor-funded programmes and NGOs
The strongest storage story in the country. TANGO alone counts over 485 member organisations, and the large international programmes run their country operations from Dar es Salaam. Their storage is field data: KoBoToolbox and ODK submissions with photographs and GPS traces attached, DHIS2 attachments, Nextcloud shares that teams sync when they come back into coverage, donor reporting exports kept for the life of the grant and well past it. Almost all of it is personal data about beneficiaries, which puts the permit regime directly in the middle of the architecture decision — and a data protection clause in the grant agreement usually sits alongside it.
The port, transit and freight forwarding
Dar es Salaam is the gateway for six land-linked countries and the Standard Gauge Railway is changing what moves inland. These operators store documents at volume: scanned bills of lading, customs declarations and TANCIS submissions, delivery photographs from drivers, EDI message archives, telematics history ingested continuously from truck fleets. Retention is long because disputes are long, and the people opening those files are in Dar es Salaam and along the corridors — not overseas.
Mining, extractives and their contractors
Gold earned Tanzania USD 4,968.4 million in exports in 2025. The buyer is usually the service contractor rather than the mine. The objects are geological and survey datasets aggregated from remote sites, drill logs, health-and-safety records and incident photography, and procurement document stores — large files written once from a site with thin bandwidth, then read many times from an office in Dar es Salaam.
Agencies, ISVs and resellers
Dar es Salaam hosts 66.5% of Tanzanian startups, concentrated on the Ali Hassan Mwinyi Road corridor. The pattern is one bucket per client: WordPress and Laravel media offloaded off the VPS disk, nightly site backups written by rclone, staging snapshots, and asset handover at the end of a project. Free egress matters most here, because an agency's buckets are read by the public rather than by the agency.
ISPs and network operators
Four mobile networks, a state backbone operator and a cluster of enterprise ISPs. Their storage is RADIUS and billing database dumps, DNS zone backups, NetFlow and monitoring retention, router configuration archives, and call records kept for as long as a licence requires. Bulk, boring, unglamorous, and painful to hold in another country.
Tourism and hospitality
2,289,867 international arrivals and USD 3.9 billion in travel receipts in 2025. Safari operators, lodges and channel managers hold enormous image and video libraries, itinerary PDFs and booking documents. Arusha and Zanzibar are the operational centres. Origin in tz-1a, CDN in front — the guest records stay in Tanzania and the photography travels.
Anyone still backing up to a drive in a desk
A great deal of Tanzanian document storage lives on an office NAS with an external disk beside it. Moving it to tz-1a adds versioning, lifecycle rules, scoped access keys and an availability SLA without leaving the country — and gets the archive off a machine that depends on the office being open, powered and dry.
Moving
Getting your objects into Dar es Salaam
From an overseas bucket
Both ends speak S3, so the move is rclone sync and a configuration change — the endpoint and the credentials. Nothing in your application logic changes, and the AWS CLI, boto3, s3cmd, the MinIO client and any S3 SDK keep working as they are. Three things change commercially. The bill arrives in Shillings, so a charge that grows with your data stops moving with the exchange rate as well. Reading your own objects stops being metered. And the objects come inside Tanzania, which is the residency argument above — no permit stands between your data and where it started. One thing to price before you begin: your current provider may bill you egress to read your own archive out, and 5 TB of data is 5 TB of their egress. That cost is theirs, not ours, but it is real and it is better known on day one than on the final invoice.
From storage branded Tanzanian but hosted elsewhere
Some products sold as Tanzanian storage are served from a data centre in another country, which is fine as engineering and fatal if in-country residency is the thing you are buying. The test takes a minute and a buyer can run it without asking anyone: resolve the endpoint, run a traceroute, see where the packets stop. tz-1a.s3.lineserve.net resolves to Dar es Salaam. If your data protection position depends on the location of the machine, then the location of the machine is the specification — and it is the one specification you can verify yourself before you sign anything.
Migration planning is part of onboarding. Tell [email protected] what you are moving, how much of it there is and what is reading it today, and we will plan the cutover with you.
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.
In tz-1a, our Dar es Salaam region. Objects written to tz-1a.s3.lineserve.net are held in Tanzania and stay there unless you copy them elsewhere.
Yes. Set the endpoint to https://tz-1a.s3.lineserve.net and keep your code, your scripts and your SDK. The API is S3-compatible, so the endpoint URL is the only thing that changes.
If the personal data stays in Tanzania, the transfer question does not arise for it — there is nothing to permit, because nothing crosses the border. Whether any of your other processing needs a permit is between you and the Personal Data Protection Commission. Lineserve supplies the location; the compliance position is yours as controller.
The rate is tiered on stored volume: TZS 156.19 per GB per month up to 1 TB, TZS 133.88 up to 5 TB, TZS 111.56 up to 10 TB, and TZS 89.25 above 10 TB on a custom quote. Prices exclude VAT, and 18% is added at checkout.
Nothing. Transfer in, transfer out and API requests are free at every tier — you pay for what you store, and reading your own objects back is not a metered line.
The per-GB rate follows total stored volume, so crossing a tier boundary lowers the rate. Billing is on average monthly usage over the month.
M-Pesa and other mobile money, bank transfer, or card — all in TZS. Nothing converts, no international transaction appears on your statement, and your bank adds no foreign-transaction fee.
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, and presigned URLs give time-limited access to a single object without sharing a key.
Enable versioning on the bucket and object history is kept, so an overwrite or a delete is recoverable. Lifecycle rules handle the other direction — automatic expiry or transition per bucket, so retention happens by policy rather than by somebody remembering.
Yes. Enable static website hosting on the bucket to serve a static site or SPA, or use presigned URLs for time-limited access to individual objects. With egress free, serving public media from a bucket is a fixed cost rather than a traffic-dependent one.
Yes, with a CDN in front of it. That is the standard shape for tour operators and anyone else whose audience is abroad: the origin keeps your data in Tanzania and satisfies the residency question, and the cache handles the distance. Origin locally, cache globally.
Yes — tz-1a in Dar es Salaam, ke-1a in Nairobi and ng-1a in Lagos are live with their own S3 endpoints, in the same account. Bear in mind that replicating personal data to a second country is a transfer outside Tanzania, and the Commission's permit regime applies to that copy.
Yes, and it is the most common use of it. Nightly database dumps, rclone backups off a VPS or dedicated server, snapshots and archives — written to a bucket in the same region as the machine, over private networking, with no transfer charge on the way in or the way back out.
No — displayed prices exclude VAT, and mainland VAT of 18% is added at checkout.
Tanzanian law requires a business paying a non-resident for services to withhold 15% of the gross consideration unless a double taxation agreement reduces it, irrespective of where the service is performed. Lineserve invoices Tanzania from LINESERVE, INC. Settle the treatment with your tax adviser at account opening, and talk to [email protected] so the invoicing matches how you remit.
Yes — +255 761 847 121, with [email protected] for everything else. Tanzania is on East Africa Time, UTC+3, all year with no daylight saving.
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