LINESERVE

Ubuntu VPS in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam or Lagos

Ubuntu VPS Hosting in Kenya, Tanzania and Nigeria

You have already picked the distribution. The choice left is the city.

Whatever you are about to install, somebody has already written down how to install it on Ubuntu. None of that changes when the machine moves — the runbook, the cloud-init file and the answer on the forum are the same in every region. What changes is who the box is near. Deploy 24.04 LTS into ke-1a in Nairobi, tz-1a in Dar es Salaam or ng-1a in Lagos, from $21.95 a month with no licence component in the price, quoted and settled in US dollars.

Starting at$21.95/month
  • Deploy in under 60 seconds
  • 99.9% uptime SLA
  • Four locally-hosted regions — Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
  • Data sovereignty — your data stays in-country
  • Free DDoS protection

No credit card required · Local billing in KES, TZS, NGN & UGX

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.

$21.95/mo

Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala

  • 1 vCPU
  • 2 GB RAM
  • 40 GB SSD
  • 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
  • 1 dedicated IPv4
  • /64 IPv6 included
Deploy

Linux VPS – 4 GB RAM

Web servers and small databases.

$42.40/mo

Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala

  • 2 vCPU
  • 4 GB RAM
  • 80 GB SSD
  • 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
  • 1 dedicated IPv4
  • /64 IPv6 included
Deploy
Most popular

Linux VPS – 8 GB RAM

Production web applications.

$83.30/mo

Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala

  • 4 vCPU
  • 8 GB RAM
  • 160 GB SSD
  • 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
  • 1 dedicated IPv4
  • /64 IPv6 included
Deploy

Linux VPS – 16 GB RAM

High-traffic applications.

$165.10/mo

Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala

  • 8 vCPU
  • 16 GB RAM
  • 320 GB SSD
  • 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
  • 1 dedicated IPv4
  • /64 IPv6 included
Deploy

Linux VPS – 32 GB RAM

Enterprise applications.

$328.70/mo

Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala

  • 16 vCPU
  • 32 GB RAM
  • 640 GB SSD
  • 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
  • 1 dedicated IPv4
  • /64 IPv6 included
Deploy

Linux VPS – 64 GB RAM

Massive workloads and consolidation.

$655.90/mo

Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala

  • 32 vCPU
  • 64 GB RAM
  • 1280 GB SSD
  • 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
  • 1 dedicated IPv4
  • /64 IPv6 included
Deploy

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

Your packages cross the ocean once. Your users cross it all day.

An apt pull is a build-time cost. A few hundred megabytes, once, on a path nobody is sitting in front of waiting. The traffic that decides how the application feels is the other kind, and Ubuntu never caches it for you: the login POST, the dashboard query, the search, the cart write, the webhook you have thirty seconds to acknowledge. Every one of those is computed rather than served from a cache, and it goes wherever the origin is. Put the origin in Nairobi and a Nairobi request becomes a trip across a city — typically single-digit milliseconds — instead of a trip across an ocean and back.

Ubuntu's ubiquity is what makes that a purely geographic decision. ufw, systemd, unattended-upgrades and the user-data you paste into every deploy behave identically on a box in Lagos and a box in Frankfurt, so nothing about the operating system asks you to think about where it is. The region is left free to be chosen for the only thing it affects: distance to the people using what you built.

It is a field on the create call, not a separate account, contract or endpoint. Same API token, same image, same cloud-init, different region code. Teams that end up running in two of the three countries usually get there by copying one Terraform block and changing three characters.

24.04 LTS

Default image — security updates to 2029

3

Cities to choose between at deploy time

$21.95

2 GB plan — 1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 40 GB, per month

$0

Licence component on any Linux image

The first box is meant to be cheap

Most in-country tiers start as one 2 GB plan at $21.95 running a staging copy for a fortnight, so the team can watch real requests from real handsets before anything production-shaped is agreed. Snapshot it, keep it or destroy it.

Why Ubuntu

Why Ubuntu on Lineserve

Ubuntu LTS pairs five years of security updates with the largest package ecosystem in Linux — and on Lineserve it lands on NVMe hardware in your region, ready the moment it boots.

  • The image is free on every plan — you only pay for the server.
  • LTS releases get five years of security updates from Canonical.
  • Cloud-init runs your setup on first boot — packages, users, and keys, done.
  • apt and the Ubuntu ecosystem: almost everything you'll ever install is a package away.

Ubuntu images

Updated regularly

24.04 LTSDefault — security updates to 2029
22.04 LTSSupported to 2027
Custom ISO upload supported on all plans.

Use cases

What people run on Ubuntu

Web hosting & WordPress

Nginx or Apache with PHP and a database — the classic LAMP/LEMP stack Ubuntu is famous for.

Docker & containers

Ubuntu is the most common Docker host in the world. Install the engine and compose your stack in minutes.

Node.js, Python & Go apps

First-class toolchains via apt and snap; run your API or app server behind a reverse proxy.

PostgreSQL & MySQL

NVMe-backed databases with predictable performance, snapshots before risky migrations.

Dev & staging boxes

Spin up a disposable environment per branch, then snapshot or destroy it when you're done.

VPN & network edge

WireGuard or OpenVPN on a dedicated IPv4 in your region, with a free /64 IPv6 block.

Who runs here

What international teams put on Ubuntu in these three countries

The Kenyan tier of a European SaaS

Application servers, a read replica and a cache in ke-1a, the control plane left in Frankfurt or Dublin, DNS sending each user to the nearer origin. A 4 GB plan at $42.40 alongside what you already run, rather than instead of it — the same Ubuntu build your pipeline already produces, deployed to one more target.

A compose file that behaves the same in Lagos

Ubuntu is the most common Docker host in the world, which means the stack you have been running for three years comes up unchanged on a machine in ng-1a. Engine, compose file, volumes, reverse proxy. The only edited line is the region.

Node, Python and Go APIs taking domestic callbacks

Payment webhooks, USSD gateway backends and partner callbacks that originate inside the country and expect a fast, reliable acknowledgement. When the receiver is in the same city as the sender, the retry queue stops being interesting.

An agency's client sites, one account, three countries

Multi-tenant WordPress and Laravel hosting where a client's tender specifies which country the data is held in. One login, one API token, one invoice, and an in-country IP so each client's site resolves locally.

The tunnel and the pilot

WireGuard or IPsec on a small Ubuntu box bridging your existing VPC to ke-1a, tz-1a or ng-1a, so the new tier joins the network you already have. Cloud servers built to your own spec start at $13.89 when a fixed plan is the wrong shape.

Ubuntu VPS from $21.95/month; cloud servers built to spec from $13.89. Prices exclude VAT and annual billing runs ten months for twelve on eligible plans.

Regions

Nairobi, Dar es Salaam or Lagos — and what decides it

The rule is unglamorous and it holds nearly everywhere: put the workload in the country whose users and whose records it serves. Per-unit prices are identical in all three regions, so the decision is geography and law rather than cost — and there is no useful midpoint, because traffic between the three cities is still commonly carried through Europe.

ke-1a is for Kenyan users and Kenyan records, and for regional teams whose head office is already in Nairobi. Every Kenyan subsea cable — TEAMS, SEACOM, EASSy, LION2, DARE1 and PEACE — comes ashore at Mombasa, and that capacity is carried roughly 480 km inland to the city where the carriers and the customers are. Domestic traffic never makes that trip: it is exchanged inside Nairobi at KIXP, the neutral exchange TESPOK has run since 2002, with 136 peer networks and 2.9 Tbps of connected capacity. Lineserve peers there.

tz-1a is for Tanzanian users, and it is where moving an origin changes the most: Tanzania has no content-delivery edge of its own, so a Dar es Salaam viewer is served from another country however the CDN is configured. There is no inland haul either — SEACOM, EASSy and SEAS come ashore in the city itself, and Dar es Salaam is a named landing point on 2Africa. Tanzanian networks meet at TIX, run since 2003 by the country's service-provider association, and 13,820 km of state fibre carries one origin on to Mwanza, Arusha and Dodoma.

ng-1a is for scale and for regulated Nigerian workloads. Eight subsea systems land in and around Lagos, among them MainOne, SAT-3, WACS, Equiano and 2Africa, which comes ashore at Lekki. Nigerian networks exchange domestic traffic at IXPN, founded in 2006 to stop domestic packets being hauled to London and now running 13 points of presence across seven states. Lagos also has a date attached: a Central Bank circular directs payment transaction data generated in Nigeria to be stored there from 1 January 2027.

All three give a buyer based elsewhere the same pair of things: a request from a user in the city reaches a machine in that city, typically in single-digit milliseconds, and the records it touches sit under one named country's law.

Live

Kenya

Nairobi

~2 ms

typical, within metro · Data stays in Kenya

Live

Tanzania

Dar es Salaam

~6 ms

typical, within metro · Data stays in Tanzania

Live

Nigeria

Lagos

~4 ms

typical, within metro · Data stays in Nigeria

Live

Uganda

Kampala

~3 ms

typical, within metro · Data stays in Uganda

Expansion zonesSouth Africa · za-1aGhana · gh-1a

Uptime SLA

99.9%

  • Service credits applied automatically when we miss the SLA
  • Measured monthly, per region, on network and power availability
  • Tier III colocation facilities across all live regions

Support

You are on a different continent from your infrastructure

That is the real reservation, and it is answerable with what exists. Architecture, quotes, contracts, a data processing agreement, the registered names and tax identifiers that have to appear on your invoices: [email protected], in writing, in a thread you can forward to your own legal and finance people. Running services are driven from the console, the API and the ticket system on your account. Two phone lines are published for the region — +254 119 039 063 in Kenya and +255 761 847 121 in Tanzania.

Scheduling across the distance is the practical problem, and the arithmetic is friendlier than it looks. Nairobi and Dar es Salaam run on East Africa Time, UTC+3; Lagos on West Africa Time, UTC+1. Neither observes daylight saving, so the gap between your clock and theirs moves only when your own clocks change, and a window agreed in June still means what you thought it meant in December. From London, Nairobi is three hours ahead in winter and two in summer, and Lagos an hour ahead in winter and level in summer. From New York in July, a 09:00 call is 14:00 in Lagos.

Most of what would be a phone call elsewhere is a call you make yourself. Building, resizing, rebooting, snapshotting and rebuilding an instance are API and console operations that behave identically at three in the morning your time or theirs, and a browser console reaches a machine that has lost its own networking. What needs a person in the building is a physical fault — and that person is there already.

FAQ

Questions, answered

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is the default image, with 22.04 LTS also available at deploy time — both kept current. You can also bring your own image with a custom ISO.

Yes. All Linux images, Ubuntu included, are free on every plan — the plan price is the full price of the server.

Yes. Every Ubuntu VPS gives you complete root access and SSH key authentication from the moment it boots. It's your server to configure however you like.

Yes. Provide cloud-init user data at deploy and your server bootstraps itself on first boot — packages installed, users created, keys in place before you ever log in.

Yes. Run Ubuntu's standard do-release-upgrade in place, or deploy a fresh 24.04 server and migrate. Either way, snapshot first so you can roll back in a click.

Yes. Resize to a larger plan as your workload grows, with minimal downtime. Compute and storage scale together across the tiers.

Every plan supports on-demand snapshots and scheduled automated backups. Snapshot storage is billed per GB beyond your included allowance.

The one your users are in — Kenyan traffic in ke-1a, Tanzanian in tz-1a, Nigerian in ng-1a. Per-unit prices are identical in all three, so nothing about the decision is commercial. If you serve two of the three, run two instances; there is no useful midpoint between the cities.

Yes. Package pulls leave the region over the same internet as everyone else's, and they are a build-time cost measured in minutes per month rather than something a user waits on. If your pipeline bakes images, that cost lands on your builders and never on the server at all.

24.04 LTS, unless a dependency pins you to 22.04. It carries security updates to 2029, which is longer than most teams keep an instance, and it means the machine you deploy into Lagos this quarter does not need re-platforming while the market you deployed it for is still growing.

Yes, on one console, one API and one invoice. Where personal data is copied between regions, treat it as a cross-border transfer under the origin country's law — Tanzania in particular requires a permit from its Commission before personal data leaves — and settle that before you schedule the replication.

Yes, and you usually should if part of your audience is elsewhere. The cache serves what has already been computed; the Ubuntu box computes the rest. Moving the origin into the country is the part no cache configuration does for you.

In US dollars by card or bank transfer, from a dollar price list rather than a conversion applied at checkout. If the cost belongs to a local subsidiary instead, switch to that market and it settles in KES, TZS or NGN. Prices exclude VAT, which is calculated and shown separately where it applies.

Yes. The instance, its volume and everything on it are created in that region's city and are not moved out of the country without your instruction — data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act, Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act or Nigeria's Data Protection Act, depending on where you deployed.

Your data stays in the region you deploy to. Across our data centres in Nairobi (Kenya), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), and Lagos (Nigeria) it never has to leave the continent — deploy in the country closest to your users and your data is held there.

In whichever of our three regions you choose — Nairobi (ke-1a), Dar es Salaam (tz-1a), or Lagos (ng-1a). Your content is stored and served from that in-country facility.

Pay in USD by card or bank transfer — or switch to our Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria or Uganda market to pay locally in KES, TZS, NGN or UGX with methods like M-Pesa and MTN Mobile Money.

You can view and pay in USD, or switch to a local market to pay in KES (Kenya), TZS (Tanzania), or NGN (Nigeria). You're settled in the currency you choose at checkout.

Deploy your Ubuntu 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 & UGX