Windows VPS — hosted in Dar es Salaam
Windows VPS Hosting in Tanzania
Licensed Windows Server, quoted in shillings.
The Windows Server licence is inside the price, and the price is in TZS. The 2 GB Windows plan starts at TZS 63,900 a month for 1 vCPU, 2 GB of RAM and 40 GB of NVMe, with RDP, full administrator rights, a dedicated IPv4 and a pre-activated image, running in Dar es Salaam. One supplier, one invoice, one currency, and nothing to key in on first boot.
- Windows Server 2019, 2022 or 2025 Standard, pre-activated
- Licence included in the shilling price — nothing bought separately in dollars
- RDP and full administrator rights on every plan
- Data residency for Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act — your data stays in-country
- Deploy in under 60 seconds · 99.9% uptime SLA
No credit card required · Local billing in KES, TZS & NGN
Pricing
Simple plans, billed in your currency
Windows licensing included on every plan. Pay in local currency — no cards, no forex surprises. Annual billing gets you two months free.
Windows VPS – 2 GB RAM
Windows Server for web applications.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos
- 1 vCPU
- 2 GB RAM
- 40 GB NVMe
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
- Windows Server 2022 license included
Windows VPS – 4 GB RAM
Windows Server for production apps.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos
- 2 vCPU
- 4 GB RAM
- 80 GB NVMe
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
- Windows Server 2022 license included
Windows VPS – 8 GB RAM
Windows Server for high-traffic apps.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos
- 4 vCPU
- 8 GB RAM
- 160 GB NVMe
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
- Windows Server 2022 license included
Windows VPS – 16 GB RAM
Windows Server for enterprise apps.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos
- 8 vCPU
- 16 GB RAM
- 320 GB NVMe
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
- Windows Server 2022 license included
Windows VPS – 32 GB RAM
Windows Server for large-scale apps.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos
- 16 vCPU
- 32 GB RAM
- 640 GB NVMe
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
- Windows Server 2022 license included
Windows VPS – 64 GB RAM
Windows Server at maximum scale.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos
- 32 vCPU
- 64 GB RAM
- 1280 GB NVMe
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
- Windows Server 2022 license included
Prices exclude VAT. Local currency figures are indicative and settled at checkout. Need a custom configuration? Talk to Sales.
Weighing up Linux too? Compare all Linux & Windows plans on the VPS Hosting page.
Network
Dar es Salaam, and the backbone that reaches Mwanza
A Windows instance is bought to be logged into, and that changes what distance means. A web page pays the journey once. A remote desktop pays it on the keystroke, the redraw, the scroll bar, and the dialog box that has to paint before you can click it — continuously, for as long as somebody is working. The same map looks different when the workload is interactive.
Tanzania's answer to that is state-owned and 13,820 km long. NICTBB, the national broadband backbone managed by TTCL, has laid 13,820 km of a 16,280 km target, reaches every region of the country and crosses into Zambia, Malawi, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, with a further TZS 73 billion allocated in FY2025/26. A finance officer in Dodoma, a lodge manager in Arusha, a site clerk in the southern corridor and a warehouse supervisor in Mwanza all reach Dar es Salaam over domestic fibre. Reaching Frankfurt, every one of them adds a coastal landing and an ocean to the same session, on every keystroke.
Their last mile is usually mobile: mobile wireless carries roughly 99% of Tanzanian internet connections, spread across four operators with no majority holder — Vodacom on 36.19 million subscriptions, Yas on 31.85 million, Airtel on 23.75 million, Halotel on 18.32 million. 4G now covers 94.2% of the population. That last mile is already the least predictable part of a remote desktop session, which is precisely the argument for taking everything else out of the path and keeping the rest of the journey inside the country.
13,820 km
National backbone fibre laid (NICTBB, FY2024/25)
94.2%
4G population coverage (TCRA, Dec 2025)
6
Neighbouring countries the national backbone crosses into
111.9M
Telecom subscriptions in Tanzania (TCRA, Q1 2026)
What a remote desktop actually needs
Not a fast link — a steady one, and a short one. Every plan runs on a 1 Gbps port with unlimited local traffic, which covers the part people forget about a hosted desktop: the file copies. The month-end export pulled down to a laptop, the scanned invoices pushed up, the 400 MB database backup dragged across at 16:45 on a Friday. Those are the moments a hosted machine either feels like the PC in the office or does not.
The corridor, not just the city
Dar es Salaam port is the sea gateway for six land-linked countries, and the Standard Gauge Railway is reshaping how goods move inland from it. Tanzanian companies in freight, mining supply and distribution are rarely in one building — they are in Dar es Salaam with people at a border post, a depot and a site, all needing the same environment from wherever they are that week.
Payments
A bigger ticket, paid in shillings
Windows hosting is where foreign-currency pricing is most entrenched, because the licence underneath it usually is. Here the licence is already inside the TZS figure, so what is left to choose is the rail. The 8 GB Windows plan at TZS 186,600 a month, the 16 GB Windows plan at TZS 370,200, the 32 GB Windows plan at TZS 737,400: those are finance-department numbers, and every one of them is a shilling number. Tanzania's payment infrastructure has caught up with that — the Bank of Tanzania's instant payment system moved US$11.6 billion in 2024, more than double the year before, and wallet-to-wallet across operators works — but at these amounts most Tanzanian finance teams still reach for a transfer.
Bank transfer, first
The rail built for this size of charge. It gives accounts payable a document to match, survives a purchase-order process, and handles an annual commitment across several instances in one movement rather than a queue of wallet pushes against a daily limit.
M-Pesa
For a single instance on monthly billing, the wallet is faster than raising a payment run — approve it on the handset and the machine is yours. In TZS from a Vodacom Tanzania wallet, with nothing converted and no foreign-transaction fee arriving behind it.
Card
Visa and Mastercard, charged in shillings, for teams whose procurement runs on a company card. The amount that leaves the account is the amount on the invoice, because there is no currency in between to move.
Tanzanian VAT at 18% is added at checkout. Annual billing runs ten months for twelve.
What's included
Everything on every plan
No feature tiers, no upsell traps. Each Windows VPS ships with the full stack — you only choose how much compute you need.
RDP access
Full Remote Desktop out of the box, ready the moment your instance boots.
Full administrator rights
Complete control of your Windows environment — install anything, configure everything.
NVMe SSD storage
Enterprise NVMe drives for fast boot, snappy databases, and low I/O latency.
Free DDoS protection
Always-on network-layer mitigation included on every plan at no extra cost.
Licensed & activated
Windows Server ships fully licensed and activated — nothing to bring or manage.
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.
Dedicated IPv4
A dedicated public IPv4 address included, with more available on demand.
60-second deploy
Provision a production-ready Windows instance in under a minute, every time.
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
Licensing, made simple
Licensed and activated. Nothing to bring.
The most common Windows hosting headache is licensing. We remove it entirely — every instance is legitimately licensed and ready to run from first boot.
- Windows Server licensing is included in every plan price — no separate license to buy.
- Instances ship pre-activated. There's nothing to key in and nothing to renew.
- Licensing is provided under a Services Provider License Agreement (SPLA) and billed per active instance.
- Choose Windows Server 2016, 2019, 2022, or 2025 at deploy time, and change versions on a fresh build.
License status
Windows Server 2025 Datacenter
Deep dive: Server 2019 · Server 2022 · Server 2025
Use cases
Built for the way you use Windows
.NET & ASP.NET hosting
Run IIS, ASP.NET, and full .NET workloads on a platform built for them — no compatibility layers.
SQL Server databases
Host Microsoft SQL Server with fast NVMe storage and the RAM headroom real workloads need.
Trading & forex terminals
Low-latency Windows desktops for MetaTrader and trading platforms, running 24/7 close to home.
Remote desktops for teams
Give your team a shared, always-on Windows environment they can reach securely over RDP.
How it works
Live in three steps
Choose region & plan
Pick Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, or Lagos, then the compute size that fits your workload.
Deploy in under 60 seconds
We provision a fully licensed, activated Windows Server instance — no setup steps for you.
Connect over RDP
Log in with Remote Desktop and full admin rights. Your environment is ready to use.
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
Licensing & invoicing
The licence is arithmetic you can check
Windows Server Standard here is licensed per vCPU on a minimum of four cores, provided under a Services Provider License Agreement, billed per active instance and pre-activated on first boot. In shillings, Windows Server 2022 Standard is TZS 5,000 per vCPU per month. Four cores minimum means TZS 20,000 a month on every plan up to four vCPU.
Now check that against the price list. The Linux 2 GB plan — 1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 40 GB — is TZS 43,900 a month. The 2 GB Windows plan is the same machine with Windows on it, at TZS 63,900. The difference is TZS 20,000, which is the licence, in shillings, exactly where the arithmetic puts it. Version choice moves it the way you would expect: 2019 Standard is TZS 4,000 per vCPU per month, 2025 Standard is TZS 6,000. You can price your own build before you open the configurator.
That transparency is worth something specific in Tanzania. Since GN 198 of 2025 took effect on 28 March 2025, following the Finance Act 2024's amendment of the Bank of Tanzania Act, goods and services inside the country are quoted, advertised and paid in Tanzanian Shillings — so every other supplier in your ledger is now a shilling figure. A Windows licence billed in dollars and re-priced by your bank on the day the charge lands is the one row that will not sit still. Here it is a shilling component of a shilling plan price, and it does not move between the quote and the statement.
Mainland VAT is 18% and applies to digital and electronic services, administered by the TRA, with Zanzibar administering its own VAT through the Zanzibar Revenue Authority. Displayed prices exclude VAT and 18% is added at checkout.
What the included licence covers
Windows Server Standard, chosen at deploy time from 2019, 2022 or 2025, activated when the instance first boots. Nothing to purchase alongside it, nothing to key in, nothing to renew, and no separate vendor to reconcile against. Moving to a different Windows Server version means a fresh build rather than an in-place upgrade — plan it the way you would plan any OS change.
What you still license yourself
The operating system is ours to license; what you install on top of it is yours. Your ERP, your accounting package, your line-of-business application and any database engine you bring keep their existing licences, exactly as they would on a machine in your own office. Full administrator rights means anything you are licensed to run, runs.
Talk to [email protected] before you order if you need a specific Windows Server version across a fleet, annual terms, or a purchase order raised against the account.
Data residency
On a desktop, personal data is never only in the database
Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act, 2022 took effect on 1 May 2023, and the Personal Data Protection Commission has been fully operational since April 2024. The provision that decides hosting is the cross-border one: personal data leaves Tanzania on a permit from the Commission, applied for in advance under Regulation 20 with the recipient, the categories of data, the purpose and duration of the transfer, the destination country and the security arrangements there all set out. The Commission may approve, ask for more, or refuse, and it monitors the conditions afterwards. This is a permission you hold or do not hold, and administrative penalties reach TZS 100 million.
A Windows instance makes what is at stake unusually concrete, because a desktop is where personal data actually lives in most organisations. The payroll spreadsheet on the desktop. The signed contract PDF in Documents. The debtors' export somebody ran last Tuesday and left in Downloads. The local mail archive. The shared folder the field team drops photographs of ID cards into. The ad-hoc backup on the second volume that exists because somebody sensible made one. None of that is in a database, none of it is on anybody's data map, and all of it is personal data.
Put the desktop in Dar es Salaam and every one of those files is in Tanzania — mapped or not, remembered or not. Put it in Johannesburg or Frankfurt and each one is a transfer.
What residency gives your compliance work
Data residency for Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act, with your data held in Dar es Salaam and not moved out of Tanzania without your instruction. Your own registration with the Commission as a controller or processor stays yours wherever the machine sits — what location changes is whether the cross-border question arises for the data on it at all.
Who runs here
Tanzanian teams whose software only runs on Windows
Accounting and ERP that only ships for Windows
The package the finance team has used for nine years, the payroll module nobody wants to migrate, the fixed-asset register with a thick client and a licence key. One hosted instance replaces the shared PC everybody remotes into, gives the same environment to head office and the branch, and turns an unbudgeted hardware replacement into a monthly TZS line item. This is the single most common reason a Tanzanian business buys Windows hosting.
SQL Server and line-of-business databases
The database behind the ERP, the reporting instance the analysts hit, the scheduled jobs that rebuild indexes at 02:00 and email a report at 06:00. Windows-first stacks tend to arrive as a set rather than a single machine, and they want NVMe underneath them and administrator rights over the service accounts.
Mining and extractives contractors
Gold is Tanzania's largest export earner, and the hosting buyers are usually the service and supply companies around the mines rather than the mines themselves: HSE compliance systems, contractor management, procurement portals, geological and survey data stores. The sites are upcountry on links that are already thin, which is a strong argument against adding an intercontinental leg to every screen refresh.
Freight forwarding, customs and transport management
Transport management systems, customs integration middleware, EDI, container-tracking front ends — much of it still a Windows client application because that is what the vendor ships. The operators sit in Dar es Salaam, the clearing agents sit at the border, and the trucks are on Tanzanian roads.
Hospitality property management systems
PMS and channel-manager software for operators in Arusha and Zanzibar, frequently Windows with a thick client and a licence tied to it. One hosted instance replaces a PC in a lodge office that has to stay switched on for the reservations desk to work — and stays reachable when the office generator does not.
Financial services back office
Banks, microfinance institutions and insurers run reconciliation, settlement and regulatory reporting tooling that is Windows-first even where the customer-facing stack is not. These are the buyers most exposed to the data-protection question and the ones whose auditors ask where the machine physically is, in writing.
.NET shops and ISVs
Dar es Salaam hosts 66.5% of Tanzanian startups, and the ones shipping .NET need production instances, a build agent, a demo environment and a staging box that mirrors what the customer will run. Sell your client a shilling-priced instance instead of a dollar figure you have to re-quote every quarter.
Migrating
Coming off a dollar invoice, or off the tower in the corner
From the machine in your own office
A tower under a desk running the accounting package for the whole company is a single point of failure with a power cable attached, and everyone in the building knows it. It depends on your mains supply, your router, your office door lock and Windows Update's private opinion of when to restart. Moving it to a hosted instance gives it a 99.9% uptime SLA, a door that opens over RDP whether or not the office is open, NVMe storage instead of a five-year-old spinning disk, and a monthly TZS line item in place of a replacement you did not budget for. The staff experience barely changes — same application, same licence, same desktop. What changes is that keeping it running is now somebody's job.
From an overseas Windows VPS billed in dollars
The charge you can see is the monthly one. The ones you cannot are the FX spread, the card issuer's foreign-transaction fee, and the fact that the shilling figure differs between the quotation, the invoice and the bank statement — which is exactly what an annual budget has no room to absorb. A TZS price is the price, and the Windows licence inside it is priced in shillings too, at TZS 5,000 per vCPU per month for 2022 Standard on a four-core minimum, so the whole figure is one you can forecast. The technical move is the ordinary one: stand up the new instance, install the application, copy the data, run both for a week, then cut over.
Ask any provider you are weighing up, this one included: where is the machine physically, is the Windows licence in the price or beside it, what does the SLA pay when it misses, and which currency does the invoice arrive in.
FAQ
Questions, answered
It's included. Every plan ships with a fully licensed, activated copy of Windows Server, provided under a Services Provider License Agreement and billed per active instance. There's nothing to bring or key in.
You can choose Windows Server 2016, 2019, 2022, or 2025 when you deploy. To move to a different version, spin up a fresh instance on the version you want.
Yes. You can resize to a larger plan as your workload grows, with minimal downtime. Storage and compute scale independently on the higher tiers.
Yes. Our plans are sized for SQL Server workloads, with fast NVMe storage and generous RAM. SQL Server licensing is handled separately from the base Windows license — talk to sales for a sized quote.
Yes. Our team assists with migrating existing Windows workloads into Lineserve at no extra charge. Reach out to support to plan the move.
Every plan includes at least one dedicated public IPv4 address. Higher tiers include additional addresses, and more are available on request.
In tz-1a, our Dar es Salaam region. The instance is created there and stays there unless you move it.
Yes. Every Windows plan ships with a Windows Server Standard licence provided under a Services Provider License Agreement, billed per active instance and pre-activated on first boot. There is nothing to buy separately and nothing to renew.
Windows Server 2022 Standard is TZS 5,000 per vCPU per month on a minimum of four cores — TZS 20,000 a month on any plan up to four vCPU. You can see it in the price list: Linux 2 GB plan is TZS 43,900 and the 2 GB Windows plan, the same machine with Windows on it, is TZS 63,900. Windows Server 2019 Standard is TZS 4,000 per vCPU per month and 2025 Standard is TZS 6,000.
Windows Server 2019, 2022 or 2025 Standard, selected at deploy time. Changing version later means a fresh build rather than an in-place upgrade.
Yes, on every plan, over RDP. It is your machine: install software, change services, join it to your own domain, set your own update policy.
Yes. Full administrator rights means any Windows software you are licensed to run. Windows Server itself is licensed by us; licences for the applications you install on top stay with you, exactly as they would on a machine in your own office.
A real shilling price. TZS figures come from our own per-currency price list, licence component included, and are not derived from a dollar amount at the moment you check out.
No. Displayed prices exclude VAT. Mainland VAT is 18% on digital and electronic services and is added at checkout.
In TZS, by bank transfer, M-Pesa or card. Bank transfer is the usual rail at these amounts and the one a purchase-order process fits around; M-Pesa suits a single instance on monthly billing. Nothing converts and no foreign-transaction fee follows the payment.
Yes, in TZS. This is Vodacom Tanzania's M-Pesa, a separate operator under a separate regulator from the Kenyan service that shares the name.
Yes — and on a Windows instance that includes everything held on the desktop itself rather than in a database: documents, exports, mail archives, shared folders and any local backup volume. That is data residency for Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act, and nothing leaves the country without your instruction.
Not for keeping data here. The permit under the Personal Data Protection Act is what the Act requires for transferring personal data outside Tanzania, and a desktop in Dar es Salaam transfers nothing. Your own registration obligations as a controller are separate and remain yours.
The national backbone reaches every region of Tanzania from Dar es Salaam — 13,820 km of fibre laid against a 16,280 km target, crossing into six neighbouring countries — so an upcountry office reaching tz-1a stays on domestic infrastructure. Reaching a server in Europe means a coastal landing and an ocean on top of the same last mile.
Yes. Windows plans run from 2 GB Windows plan (1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 40 GB NVMe) at TZS 63,900 a month up to 64 GB Windows plan (32 vCPU, 64 GB RAM, 1,280 GB NVMe) at TZS 1,471,800, and you can move up as the workload grows. The licence component moves with the core count.
NVMe storage, 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.
Dedicated servers give you the whole machine in Dar es Salaam, also billed in TZS. Cloud servers sit in between, letting you specify vCPU, RAM and storage individually rather than choosing a fixed size.
Yes — +255 761 847 121, alongside [email protected] and the ticket queue in your console. Tanzania runs on East Africa Time, UTC+3, all year with no daylight saving.
Deploy your Windows VPS in under 60 seconds
Licensed, activated, and 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