Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos — choose your region
VPS Hosting in Kenya, Tanzania and Nigeria
Linux or Windows, in the country your users are in.
Two questions decide a deployment in this part of the world: which country the machine has to sit in, and what changes once it does. Lineserve answers the first with three regions — ke-1a in Nairobi, tz-1a in Dar es Salaam and ng-1a in Lagos — picked at deploy time from one account, one console and one API. Linux starts at $21.95 a month with full root; Windows at $31.95 with the Server 2022 licence already activated. Both run on NVMe storage with a dedicated IPv4 and a free /64 of IPv6, and both build in under 60 seconds. You are quoted and settled in US dollars, by card or bank transfer, wherever you are buying from.
- Pick the region at deploy time — ke-1a, tz-1a or ng-1a
- Linux or Windows, live in under 60 seconds
- Per-unit prices identical in all three regions, quoted in USD
- Your data is held in the country you deploy it in
- 99.9% uptime SLA and free DDoS protection on every plan
No credit card required · Local billing in KES, TZS & NGN
Pricing
Linux and Windows plans, billed in your currency
Windows licensing included on every Windows plan. Pay in local currency — no cards, no forex surprises. Annual billing gets you two months free.
S2
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
M1
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
L1
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
XL1
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
XXL
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
XXXL
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.
Regions
Three cities, and the rule for choosing between them
The rule is unglamorous and it holds nearly everywhere: put the instance in the country whose users and whose records it serves. There is no useful midpoint between these three cities, because the paths between them are not short — third-party probe data still routinely shows a Lagos-to-Nairobi round trip running longer than a Lagos-to-London one. Serving Kenyan users from Lagos buys you very little. Serving them from ke-1a buys you the whole distance.
Nairobi is the oldest of the three as an interconnection market. Domestic traffic is exchanged in the city at KIXP, the neutral exchange TESPOK has run since February 2002 — PeeringDB records 136 peer networks, 151 connections and 2.9 Tbps of capacity, with Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix and Meta present — and ke-1a peers there. The geography behind it is worth knowing: every Kenyan subsea cable lands at Mombasa, and that capacity is backhauled roughly 480 km inland.
Dar es Salaam has no inland haul at all. SEACOM, EASSy and SEAS come ashore in the city itself and it is a named landing point on 2Africa. Tanzanian networks exchange traffic domestically at TIX, listed by PeeringDB at 32 networks and 798G, and the National ICT Broadband Backbone — 13,820 km of state fibre — reaches every region and crosses into Zambia, Malawi, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. One instance in tz-1a therefore serves Mwanza, Arusha, Dodoma and Mbeya over domestic fibre rather than an international path.
Lagos is the densest landing point in West Africa: eight subsea systems come ashore in Nigeria, among them MainOne, SAT-3, WACS, Equiano and 2Africa. IXPN, founded in 2006 to stop domestic packets being hauled to London, runs 13 points of presence across seven states with more than 130 connected networks, and peak domestic traffic across it went from 1 Tbps in April 2025 to 2 Tbps by March 2026. When four of those cables failed near Côte d'Ivoire on 14 March 2024 and thirteen countries were disrupted, an application in Lagos serving Nigerian users over Nigerian networks kept the break out of its critical path.
Which reduces to one sentence worth holding on to while you size a machine: a request from a user in any of these cities reaches an instance in the same city, on a round trip typically in single-digit milliseconds, rather than crossing an ocean twice for every image, script and database query the page makes.
3
Live regions — Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and Lagos
136
Networks peering at KIXP, Nairobi (PeeringDB)
798G
Capacity connected at TIX, Dar es Salaam (PeeringDB)
2 Tbps
Peak domestic traffic at IXPN, Lagos (March 2026)
A second region is a configuration, not a project
The three regions sit on one account, one console and one API, so a standby or a read replica in another country is a form you fill in rather than a supplier you onboard. Make the call deliberately where personal data is involved: a copy of Tanzanian personal data in Lagos is a transfer out of Tanzania under the permit regime below. Machine images and telemetry without personal data raise no such question.
What a content network was never going to hold
A cache serves bytes that have already been computed. The logged-in dashboard, the search query, the cart write, the API response and the webhook you have thirty seconds to acknowledge all still go home. Putting home in the right country is the part no cache configuration does for you — and if a real share of your audience sits elsewhere, keep the edge in front of it.
Payments
Where the machine runs and where the bill lands are two questions
They are not linked, and treating them as one is a common reason a deployment sits in somebody's approvals. The region is a field on the instance. The currency is a decision about which of your entities is buying. An instance in ng-1a can be billed in dollars to a head office in Amsterdam or in Naira to a Lagos subsidiary, and the machine is identical either way.
Card, for the instance you want running now
Visa and Mastercard in USD. This is how most first instances get bought — a machine to prove the region does what the page says it does, before anybody writes a migration plan around it. Monthly billing, cancel when you like.
Transfer, for the order with a signature on it
A fleet across two regions, an XXL at $328.70 a month, or twelve months taken up front at ten months for twelve. It arrives with a reference your accounts team can match, and it fits a procurement process never designed around a card.
Move the invoice without touching the instance
If the cost belongs to a country office rather than to group, switch to that market and the same plan is priced and settled in shillings or Naira — with M-Pesa available alongside transfer and card in Kenya and Tanzania. Nothing about the running machine changes; you are choosing which ledger the line lands in.
Four price lists, not one with a converter on it
USD, KES, TZS and NGN are maintained separately rather than derived from a rate on the afternoon you check out — which is why the local figure a subsidiary approves in March is the figure that clears in November.
Annual billing runs ten months for twelve on eligible plans. Displayed prices exclude tax; where VAT applies it is calculated and shown separately at checkout.
Pick your OS
Same servers, your operating system
Every plan runs on the same NVMe-backed platform — choose the operating system that fits your stack, or dig into the dedicated page for each.
Linux VPS
Full root and SSH from first boot, with free images kept current — for web servers, containers, databases, and everything open source.
- Ubuntu, Debian, Rocky, AlmaLinux & Fedora
- Cloud-init ready on deploy
- Images free on every plan
Windows VPS
A licensed, activated Windows Server with full administrator rights over RDP — for .NET applications, SQL Server, and trading platforms.
- Windows Server 2022 license included
- Full admin rights over RDP
- Sized for SQL Server workloads
Trading forex? There's a dedicated Forex VPS page for MT4, MT5 & trading bots.
What's included
Everything on every plan
No feature tiers, no upsell traps. Every VPS ships with the full stack — you only choose the operating system and how much compute you need.
NVMe SSD storage
Enterprise NVMe drives for fast boot, quick builds, and low-latency databases.
Live in 60 seconds
Your server provisions and comes online in under a minute, Linux or Windows.
Full root or admin
Complete root access with SSH on Linux, full administrator rights over RDP on Windows.
Dedicated IPv4 & free IPv6
One dedicated public IPv4 plus a free /64 IPv6 block on every plan.
1 Gbps networking
Fast ports with unlimited local traffic — serve your region without metering anxiety.
Free DDoS protection
Always-on network-layer mitigation included on every plan at no extra cost.
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.
API & CLI
Automate everything through a clean API and command-line tool. Infrastructure as code, natively.
Procurement
What finance asks before the first instance is approved
Who is the supplier, and where. LINESERVE, INC., registered in Dover, Delaware. What sits in Kenya, Tanzania and Nigeria is infrastructure: three regions, hardware, and data held in the country you deploy into. An international buyer is invoiced in dollars, and no local entity is needed at either end for the instance to run.
Which tax rate applies. It follows the market that bills you, not the region the instance runs in — so a group buying in dollars is billed in dollars with tax shown separately where it applies, whichever cities the machines are in. Where a country office is the buyer instead, the domestic rate follows: 16% in Kenya, 18% on the Tanzanian mainland, 7.5% in Nigeria. Run any comparison on the VAT-exclusive figures, because those three rates alone can move a gross total by more than the infrastructure does.
Which entity holds the account. One account and one dollar invoice covering every region is the default and suits most groups. Where each subsidiary needs its own account in its own currency so the cost lands in the right ledger, that works too — but it is a setup decision, easy before the first order and tedious afterwards. Send [email protected] the registered names and tax identifiers that will appear on the invoices, with any purchase-order reference, and the account is configured once.
If a local entity will be the buyer
Two mechanics are worth raising with your adviser early. Tanzania requires an Electronic Fiscal Device verification code on a mainland receipt before a VAT-registered buyer can claim input tax, and a Tanzanian business paying a non-resident for services withholds 15% of the gross consideration unless a treaty reduces it. Nigeria's framework changed on 1 January 2026 and put its largest taxpayers inside a mandatory e-invoicing regime. Both are easier to arrange at the order than at the year end.
Prices exclude VAT. Talk to [email protected] about annual terms, purchase orders or a fleet across several regions on one account.
Data residency
Pick the region with a lawyer in the room, not a latency chart
Three questions settle it, and none is about speed. Whose personal data does this workload hold? Which sector are you in? Who audits you? Law and geography usually point the same way, because your Kenyan users' records belong in Kenya for both reasons at once. Where they disagree, follow the law: a routing table can be improved next quarter and a statute cannot.
Kenya's Data Protection Act 2019 permits personal data to leave the country where appropriate safeguards have been demonstrated to the Data Commissioner. Regulation 26 goes further for six named purposes — civil registration and legal identity, the conduct of elections, administering public finances, protected computer systems, basic education, and primary or secondary health care — requiring at least one serving copy inside Kenya. Build for a ministry, a school system or a clinic network and that regulation is the whole conversation; otherwise it is narrower than most pages imply.
Tanzania is the strictest of the three, and the difference is procedural. Personal data leaves the country on a permit from the Personal Data Protection Commission, applied for with the recipient, the categories of data, the purpose, the destination country and the security arrangements there. The Commission may approve, ask for more, or refuse. That is prior authorisation: a task that finishes when a regulator says so, not when your sprint does.
Nigeria's section 41 permits a transfer where the recipient is covered by an adequate law, binding corporate rules, contractual clauses or a certification mechanism — closer to Kenya in shape. What Nigeria adds is a sectoral deadline. A Central Bank circular of 15 June 2026 directs that payment transaction data generated within Nigeria be stored and managed in Nigeria, with full compliance from 1 January 2027, naming banks, mobile money operators, fintechs, switching companies and payment service providers.
What the deployment supplies is location: an instance in ke-1a, tz-1a or ng-1a holds its data in that city, under that country's law, and does not move it out without your instruction. One more thing before you conclude that hosting elsewhere avoids all of this. Kenya's Act reaches a controller who is not established or ordinarily resident in Kenya but processes the personal data of people located in Kenya — so a company in Berlin or Boston with Kenyan users is inside that Act with its servers in Frankfurt. The machine moves; the obligation does not.
The question a procurement form actually asks
Not whether your provider holds a certificate, but in which country the data is held and who has physical access to the machine. A region code and a city name answer both in one line, which is often the difference between a tender that progresses and one that sits in a security review for six weeks.
Who deploys here
What international teams put on a VPS in these three cities
Almost nobody moves an entire estate into these three cities. They put one tier of it in the country that requires one, and leave the rest where it already works.
A product that outgrew its distance
The support tickets change before the metrics do: a Nairobi or Lagos customer mentions that the dashboard takes a moment, then mentions it again. An L1 at $83.30 running application servers and a read replica in-country, with the control plane left in Frankfurt or Virginia, usually settles it without anybody calling it a migration.
Regulated services entering the market
Payments, lending and insurance arrive with a list rather than a preference: callback receivers reachable from inside the country, a ledger, reconciliation and settlement jobs, identity documents, fraud scoring, audit archives kept for years. In Nigeria that list has a date against it; in Tanzania, a permit regime behind it.
Country programmes and field data
Form servers taking submissions over mobile data from teams days from a city, health and monitoring platforms, file sync that survives a laptop being offline for a week, and reporting a donor will audit. A single M1 at $42.40 in the right country answers both the audit question and the field team's complaint about the upload.
Delivery partners and integrators
You are building for someone else, and their tender names a country. Client environments, staging, a demo instance in the same city as the buyer, and an in-country address so the site resolves the way the client's IT team expects. Three countries on one account keeps that from becoming three supplier relationships.
Anything that ships bytes to a screen
Encoding queues, manifest and segment origins, image derivatives and catalogue APIs, paired with S3-compatible object storage at $0.061 per GB a month and $0.035 at scale, where transfer and API requests are free. Tanzania has no content-network edge of its own, which makes tz-1a the region where moving the origin changes the most.
The estate an expansion left behind
A rack a partner manages, a machine nobody has patched since the person who built it left, a hosting account whose login is in a former colleague's mailbox. Consolidating those onto one account is rarely urgent and always overdue.
Linux VPS from $21.95/month, Windows VPS from $31.95 with the licence included, cloud servers built to your own spec from $13.89, dedicated LineServe Core hardware from $309 plus a one-time $99 setup, and managed Kubernetes from $27.86.
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.
Kenya
Nairobi
~2 ms
typical, within metro · Data stays in Kenya
Tanzania
Dar es Salaam
~6 ms
typical, within metro · Data stays in Tanzania
Nigeria
Lagos
~4 ms
typical, within metro · Data stays in Nigeria
Getting here
Two ways in, and the one people expect is the rarer one
Add the region under what you already run
This is what most teams actually do, and there is nothing second-best about it. Everything stays where it is — AWS in Frankfurt, Google Cloud in London, your pipelines, your images, your monitoring. You build an instance in ke-1a, tz-1a or ng-1a, raise an IPsec or WireGuard tunnel to the network you already have, replicate only what has to be in-country, and point that country's traffic at the new origin with a DNS record. Nothing is decommissioned and nothing is rewritten. At the end you have a region in a country where your current provider does not have one, and the next country is the same afternoon with a different region code.
Move the workload outright
The case for this is usually commercial rather than technical: one supplier, one console, one invoice, and an application that lives entirely in the country it serves. The work is ordinary — build the instance, rsync the files, dump and restore the database, run both for a day, drop the TTL and cut the DNS over. Size on what you are running now rather than on the plan you outgrew elsewhere, because vCPU, RAM and storage each resize afterwards without changing the IP address. Keep the old environment alive for a week; there is no prize for cutting over on the day.
Migration planning and assistance are included at no extra charge. Tell [email protected] what you run and where, and the reply is an architecture rather than a quote.
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
Every plan — Linux or Windows — ships with NVMe SSD storage, 1 Gbps networking with unlimited local traffic, one dedicated public IPv4 address, and a free /64 IPv6 block. No feature tiers: you only choose how much compute you need.
Pick Linux for web servers, containers, databases, and anything built on open-source tooling — images are free and you get full root with SSH. Pick Windows for .NET applications, RDP desktops, SQL Server, and trading platforms — every Windows plan includes a licensed, activated Windows Server.
Yes. Windows plans include a fully licensed, activated Windows Server 2022 Standard, provided under a Services Provider License Agreement. There's nothing to bring or key in — the price you see is the full price.
Yes. Linux plans give you full root access with SSH key authentication; Windows plans give you full administrator rights over RDP. It's your server to configure however you like.
They're the same platform. VPS plans are ready-sized bundles at a fixed monthly price; the Cloud Server page lets you build a custom machine priced per vCPU, GB, and SSD. Pick whichever entry point suits you.
Yes. Resize to a larger plan as your workload grows, with minimal downtime — and you can move up the range from the smallest plan to 32 vCPUs and 64 GB of RAM without migrating providers.
Under 60 seconds for both operating systems. Linux servers run any cloud-init user data you provide; Windows servers come activated and ready for RDP.
The one whose users and records the workload serves — Kenyan in ke-1a, Tanzanian in tz-1a, Nigerian in ng-1a. Per-unit prices are identical in all three, so the choice is geography and law rather than cost. Serving two of the three means two instances; there is no useful midpoint between the cities.
Yes, and that is the default: quoted, invoiced and settled in USD by card or bank transfer, whichever region the instance is in. Choosing the Kenya, Tanzania or Nigeria market instead prices the same plan in KES, TZS or NGN, with the payment methods each of those markets uses.
No. The region is a field on the instance, not a legal arrangement. A local entity changes which ledger the invoice lands in and which tax treatment follows — nothing about whether the machine can run. You contract with LINESERVE, INC., registered in Dover, Delaware.
Linux plans run from $21.95 a month (1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 40 GB SSD) through $42.40, $83.30, $165.10 and $328.70 to $655.90 for 32 vCPU and 64 GB. Windows plans run from $31.95 to $735.90 with the Windows Server 2022 Standard licence included. Prices exclude VAT, and annual billing is ten months for twelve.
Both, at the same click and in any of the three regions. Linux gives you root and SSH from first boot on current Ubuntu, Debian, Rocky, AlmaLinux, CentOS Stream and Fedora images, with no licence component. Windows gives you administrator rights over RDP on a licensed, activated Windows Server.
In the city of the region you chose — Nairobi, Dar es Salaam or Lagos — under that country's law, and it is not moved elsewhere without your instruction. That is data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act, Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act or Nigeria's Data Protection Act.
Not necessarily. Kenya's Act reaches a controller who is not established or ordinarily resident in Kenya but processes the personal data of people located in Kenya, so a European or American company with Kenyan users is inside it whatever country the servers are in. What in-country hosting removes is the cross-border transfer analysis for the data that stays.
No. The nearest full regions are in South Africa. Nairobi and Lagos carry edge infrastructure with the compute in another country, and Tanzania has neither. That gap is why these three cities are on this page.
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 requires a permit before personal data leaves — and settle that before you schedule the replication.
NVMe storage, a 1 Gbps port with unlimited local traffic, one dedicated IPv4 and a free /64 of IPv6, always-on DDoS mitigation, on-demand snapshots and scheduled backups, private networking, a browser console, and a full API and CLI. vCPU, RAM and storage each resize independently up to 32 vCPU and 64 GB, without changing your IP address.
That path is intercontinental and always will be — comfortable for a shell session, a deploy or a package pull, and not the reason to choose a region. The region is for the users in these cities, whose in-metro round trips are typically single-digit milliseconds.
Customer references are available under NDA. Tell [email protected] what you are building and which country it is for.
Nairobi and Dar es Salaam on East Africa Time, UTC+3; Lagos on West Africa Time, UTC+1. Neither observes daylight saving, so the offset from your own office moves twice a year at your end and never at theirs — a maintenance window agreed in June means the same thing in December.
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