Block Storage — hosted in Nairobi
Block volumes in Nairobi
The disk under your database, in the same city as the regulator who asks about it.
Every Kenyan business that runs a real system eventually meets the same Tuesday: the volume is full, the database wants more from the disk than the plan gives it, and the only fix anybody can see is rebuilding a server nobody wants to touch. Block Storage is the piece that ends that. A volume is created separately from the instance, attached to it, grown while it is mounted, snapshotted before anything risky, and left standing when the server is gone. It is coming to ke-1a in Nairobi, on SSD, NVMe and HDD tiers from 10 GB to 16 TB, priced in shillings. Join the waitlist and we will tell you when it is ready.
- Volumes in ke-1a, our Nairobi region
- Data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act — your data stays in-country
- SSD, NVMe and HDD tiers, 10 GB to 16 TB
- Grow a volume without rebuilding the server under it
- Launching soon — priced and billed in KES
Launching soon · Billed in KES
Pricing
Three tiers, one per-GB price
Pick SSD, NVMe, or HDD to match your workload, then pay only for the size you provision. In your currency, no forex.
| Tier | Price /GB/mo | IOPS | Throughput | Volume sizes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Standard SSDPopular | KES 25.3 | Up to 10,000 IOPS | 250 MB/s | 10 GB – 16 TB |
| High-Performance NVMe | KES 42.5 | Up to 64,000 IOPS | 1 GB/s | 10 GB – 16 TB |
| Standard HDD | KES 15 | Up to 500 IOPS | 200 MB/s | 50 GB – 16 TB |
Volumes are billed on their provisioned size, metered hourly and totalled monthly — detached volumes are still billed until deleted. Snapshots are $0.15/GB/mo, and cross-region snapshot copies are $0.02/GB one-time. Prices exclude VAT; local currency figures are indicative and settled at checkout.
The platform
Everything a production volume needs
Provisioning, snapshots, encryption, and monitoring come wired in — so your data outlives any single server.
Instant provisioning
Create a volume and have it ready to attach in seconds, straight from the console or API.
Live resizing
Grow a volume on the fly and extend the filesystem with no downtime and no reattach.
Instant incremental snapshots
Point-in-time snapshots capture only changed blocks, so backups are fast and cheap.
99.999% durability
Every block is replicated three times within the region to survive hardware failure.
Encryption at rest
Volumes are encrypted with AES-256, with optional bring-your-own-key management.
Flexible attachment
Detach a volume from one instance and reattach it to another in the same region.
Boot volume support
Use a block volume as a bootable root disk, or as extra data disks alongside it.
Full API access
Create, attach, resize, and snapshot volumes from Terraform, the CLI, or your CI.
Monitoring & alerts
Track IOPS, throughput, and latency per volume, with alerts when they cross a threshold.
Regions
Nairobi is home. The other two are there when you need them.
ke-1a is in Nairobi, and for a Kenyan business that is most of the argument. Your customers arrive on Safaricom, on Faiba, on Zuku, on Poa — 2.65 million fixed subscriptions and 84.1 million active SIMs, nearly all of them inside the country. Lineserve peers at KIXP, the neutral exchange TESPOK runs across four Nairobi facilities, so traffic between your instance and another of its 136 networks is handed over a few kilometres away. A round trip that starts and finishes inside the metro is typically around 2 ms.
That matters because of where Kenya's bandwidth comes ashore. Every international subsea cable lands at Mombasa — SEACOM, EASSy, TEAMS, PEACE, DARE1 and LION2 — and the capacity is hauled roughly 480 km inland before it reaches a Nairobi rack. Anything leaving the country still makes that trip. Domestic traffic takes the other route entirely, exchanged in Nairobi between networks in the same city, and choosing ke-1a decides which of those two journeys your checkout depends on.
Dar es Salaam and Lagos sit on the same account, the same API and the same shilling invoice. Open tz-1a when you start selling into Tanzania and want the data held there under Tanzanian law, or ng-1a when Lagos becomes a market rather than a pin on a map. They are also where a copy goes when you want one outside Kenya — a standby database, a backup bucket — which makes disaster recovery a configuration change instead of a second supplier.
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
Uganda
Kampala
~3 ms
typical, within metro · Data stays in Uganda
Use cases
Built for what you're building
Database storage
Consistent IOPS for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB, with the durability transactional data demands.
Kubernetes persistent volumes
Our CSI driver provisions volumes straight from your PVCs, so stateful pods keep their data.
Logs & analytics
HDD throughput at a low per-GB price for append-heavy logs, media, and analytics stores.
Backup & DR
Instant snapshots plus cross-region copies give you point-in-time backups and disaster recovery.
How it works
From zero to mounted in three steps
Create a volume
Pick a tier and a size from 10 GB to 16 TB, and your volume is ready in seconds.
Attach & format
Attach it to an instance and format it as ext4, XFS, or NTFS — then mount and go.
Grow as you go
Resize the volume live as you fill it, and snapshot it on demand for backups.
Uptime SLA
99.9%
- DDoS filtering is included, not an upsell
- Service credits applied automatically when we miss the SLA
- Measured monthly, per region, on network and power availability
Support
A Nairobi number, and East Africa Time all year
Kenya has its own line: +254 119 039 063. Alongside it are [email protected] and the ticket system, and Lineserve Limited keeps an office on Utalii Lane, View Park Towers, in the Nairobi CBD. A supplier with a street address in your own city is a different kind of counterparty from a web form and a billing address in another hemisphere.
Kenya runs on East Africa Time, UTC+3, and has never observed daylight saving. That reads like trivia until you are the one holding the phone. Business hours here mean the same thing in January and in July; nothing slides by an hour twice a year because another country changed its clocks. When your checkout starts throwing 502s at 09:20 on a Tuesday, it is 09:20 for whoever picks up — an ordinary working morning in the same city, rather than the small hours of somebody's Monday night, eight time zones west.
The other half of local support is vocabulary, not hours. The person you reach knows what a Safaricom callback is, what KIXP has to do with the trace you are staring at, and why your finance team wants a KRA PIN on the invoice. None of that has to be explained before the actual problem can be. Buy from somewhere that has never sold into Kenya and the first twenty minutes of every serious ticket go on describing the country.
Kenya
+254 119 039 063Sales
[email protected]Why Lineserve
Beyond the local disk
An instance's local disk disappears the moment the instance does, can't move, and can't grow. Block volumes are independent, portable, and durable — while still keeping your data on the continent.
Pricing & invoicing
A shilling price, on a line your finance team can forecast
Block storage bills on the size you provisioned rather than the size you filled — a 500 GB volume is a 500 GB volume whether the filesystem is empty or full, metered hourly, totalled monthly, and still billed while it is detached after you delete the instance. Billing stops when the volume is deleted. That is the rule worth knowing before you size anything, and it is also what makes the line unusually easy to forecast: a volume costs the same on the day your traffic doubles as it did the day before, because nothing about the charge depends on how well the product is doing.
The tier is the cost lever rather than the size. Indicative launch pricing puts Standard HDD at KES 15.00 per GB a month, Standard SSD at KES 25.30 and High-Performance NVMe at KES 42.50, so a 200 GB log volume and a 200 GB transactional database are deliberately different numbers. Snapshots bill separately, on the storage they consume rather than the size of the source, which is why a lifecycle policy in the first week is worth more than a clear-out in the second year. Every figure here is quoted, invoiced and settled in shillings, so a charge you will carry every month for years never moves with an exchange rate you do not control.
Kenya's standard VAT rate is 16%, and the Kenya Revenue Authority's published list of taxable digital services names cloud services explicitly. Displayed prices exclude VAT and it is calculated and shown separately at checkout, so the figure in your budget line and the figure on the quotation are the same figure. VAT falls due by the 20th of the month following the earlier of invoice, performance or payment, filed on a VAT3 return through iTax — which matters more here than on most pages, because storage is a cost a Kenyan business books every month for years rather than once.
What a Kenyan tax invoice carries
The seller's KRA PIN and registered name; a unique invoice number with date and time; the buyer's KRA PIN on B2B sales; a description with quantity and taxable value; and the VAT shown separately. A Kenyan business buyer cannot claim the expense or the input VAT without a valid tax invoice bearing its own PIN, so send [email protected] your PIN and registered name before the first billing run rather than after the fourth.
Volumes grow, they do not shrink
Resizing up happens live while the volume is attached and in use, then you extend the filesystem. There is no equivalent in the other direction, so the sizing discipline on a provisioned-size product is to start close to what you need and grow into it. Headroom bought on day one is headroom you pay for every month whether or not you ever fill it.
How you will pay for it
The same way you pay for the rest of your Lineserve account when the product lands: M-Pesa and other mobile money, bank transfer, or card, all in KES. Mobile money reaches 100.1% of the population here across more than 53 million active subscriptions and 602,470 agents, so a small monthly storage line sits naturally on a wallet, and a large annual commitment sits naturally on a transfer.
Prices are indicative launch pricing and exclude VAT; 16% is calculated and shown at checkout. Talk to [email protected] or +254 119 039 063 about invoicing requirements before you order rather than in April.
Data residency
Regulation 26 offers two ways to satisfy it. This is the first one.
Kenya's Data Protection Act, No. 24 of 2019 is enforced by the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner, and most of the conversation about it concerns sections 48 and 49 — the conditions and paperwork attached to sending personal data out of Kenya, with a stricter test again for sensitive personal data. That is the general regime, and it is the reason a Kenyan controller ends up documenting a decision every time data leaves the country.
Section 50 lets the Cabinet Secretary go further and prescribe processing that may only be effected through a server or data centre in Kenya, and Regulation 26(1) of the Data Protection (General) Regulations, 2021 exercises that power for six named purposes: civil registration and legal identity management, the conduct of elections, overseeing a state organ's system for administering public finances, running a system designated as protected under the Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act, 2018, early childhood or basic education under the Basic Education Act, 2013, and the provision of primary or secondary health care.
Read how it gives you the choice. Either process the data through a server and data centre located in Kenya, or store at least one serving copy in a data centre located in Kenya. The second limb is the storage answer, and it is the one a bucket satisfies. The first limb is the compute answer — the machine doing the processing, in the country, with the working data on the disk beneath it. On a cloud, that disk is a block volume. An instance in ke-1a with its volumes in ke-1a is what the first limb looks like when somebody has to build it rather than cite it.
The narrower point is worth making even where Regulation 26 does not reach, because it reaches only those six purposes rather than Kenyan data at large. Your database volume holds the current state of everything — the loan book as it stands this minute, the member balances, the order that was placed while you were reading this. It is more complete than any archive and more sensitive than any backup, and when a Kenyan regulator, a bank's due diligence team or a corporate customer's procurement form asks where the data is, that volume is the honest answer to the question they are actually asking.
At launch, a volume created in ke-1a will be held in Nairobi and will not leave Kenya without your instruction. That is data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act. Compliance under the Act stays with you as the controller — and it is a shorter pile of work when the live data never crossed a border. Separately, entities in restricted sectors register with the ODPC regardless of size — financial services, telecommunications, health, education, insurance, betting, public bodies and religious organisations — while others may be exempt below KES 5 million turnover and ten employees. If you are in one of those sectors, where your processor puts your disks is part of your own filing.
6
Purposes named in Regulation 26 of the 2021 General Regulations
2019
Data Protection Act, No. 24 — enforced by the ODPC
16 TB
Largest single volume planned for the first release
KES
Quoted, invoiced and settled — no forex on a monthly line
The snapshot is where a position quietly moves
Snapshots are cheap, instant and easy to point at another region, which is precisely why they are the part of a design that undoes a residency decision without anybody noticing. A snapshot kept in ke-1a is durability. A snapshot copied to Dar es Salaam or Lagos is a copy of Kenyan personal data in another country, and sections 48 and 49 apply to it. Both are fine. One of them belongs in a document.
Hosting abroad does not move the obligation
Section 4(b) applies the Act to a controller or processor who is not established or ordinarily resident in Kenya but processes the personal data of data subjects located in Kenya. Putting the database on a disk in Frankfurt moves the data and leaves the duty exactly where it was — with a cross-border analysis added on top that a Nairobi volume simply does not generate.
A volume is not a backup
Three-way replication inside the region survives a dead drive. It does not survive a dropped table, a bad migration or a script somebody ran at 23:40, and it is not a second location. Snapshots and dumps into object storage in ke-1a cover those, and each is its own decision about where a copy lives. Cheaper to decide before launch than during an incident.
Who is asking for this
The Kenyan systems that are really waiting on a volume
Block storage is bought by people with a specific problem rather than a strategy: a disk that is filling, a database that wants more from it, or a server that has become too frightening to rebuild. These are the Kenyan versions of that.
Digital lenders and the loan book
The Central Bank licenses Digital Credit Providers under its 2022 regulations, and the register has grown steadily since. The system underneath is a live transactional database — disbursements, repayments, schedules, arrears — being written to all day by Daraja callbacks that arrive whether or not you are ready for them, alongside credit-scoring batch jobs reading across the same tables. That is the NVMe case: consistent IOPS matters far more than capacity, the data is the business, and the disk it sits on should not disappear when somebody resizes the instance.
SACCO core banking, and the week the month ends
Deposit-taking SACCOs regulated by SASRA run a core system with an unusual load curve: quiet for three weeks, then month-end batch processing, statement generation, interest runs and the dividend run, all in the same handful of days. That is a workload that wants IOPS on demand and headroom on the volume, and both are things you would rather change in an afternoon than plan a year ahead. Member records, balances and the audit trail underneath them are also exactly the data a Kenyan regulator asks the location of.
Newsrooms, and the archive that only grows
Nairobi's media sector has a load pattern most markets do not: a general election every five years in August, budget day in June, and national exam results, each producing a single-day spike on the same few sites. Between those days the real story is quieter — a CMS database and a media library that add a little every day and never subtract, until the disk on the server somebody built in 2022 is the thing standing between the desk and publishing. HDD volumes carry that growth at the lowest per-GB tier, and they grow while mounted.
ISPs, WISPs and the systems that must be in Kenya
RADIUS and AAA databases, billing and provisioning stacks, NetFlow collectors, Zabbix and LibreNMS retention, IPAM, recursive resolvers. These are meaningless outside the country they serve, they write continuously, and the operators running them will check where a machine is before they read a word of a page like this. A volume per system, sized separately, resized when subscriber growth says so, and snapshotted before every stack upgrade.
E-commerce and the catalogue behind the storefront
Product images belong in a bucket. The database does not: orders, inventory, prices, the reconciliation of every M-Pesa callback against a cart, and the checkout that a Nairobi shopper feels directly. Standard SSD suits it, the volume grows with the order history rather than with the traffic, and a snapshot before a plugin upgrade is the difference between a bad hour and a bad quarter.
Health and education programmes inside Regulation 26
DHIS2 deployments, school management systems, county health platforms. Where a programme delivers primary or secondary health care, or basic education under the Basic Education Act, Regulation 26 applies to that processing directly — and its first limb is a server and data centre in Kenya, which is an instance in ke-1a with its volumes beside it. Programme teams generally find this conversation easier before an implementation than during a donor audit.
Agencies running many client systems at once
Nairobi's agency and freelance scene is the reseller channel in this market: one buyer, a dozen client systems, each with its own database and its own habit of outgrowing whatever plan it was put on. Independent volumes turn that from a rebuild per client into a resize per client, and a snapshot per client before every theme change, plugin update or handover.
Indicative launch pricing in shillings: Standard SSD from KES 25.30 per GB a month, High-Performance NVMe from KES 42.50, Standard HDD from KES 15.00, billed on provisioned size. Prices exclude VAT. Figures are the launch price list rather than a charge you can incur today.
Planning ahead
How your data gets onto a volume when it lands
From the disk your server came with
The most common Kenyan starting point, and the quickest move. The data is already in Nairobi on a Lineserve instance, sitting on storage that dies with the machine and cannot grow past the plan it arrived on. At launch, the move is to attach a volume, copy the directory across, remount it at the same path and carry on — the application never learns anything changed. What you gain is separation. The server becomes something you can rebuild on a whim, and the database stops being the reason you do not. If you have been keeping a production database on instance storage because moving it was never anybody's Tuesday, this release is aimed squarely at you.
From a volume with a provider abroad
Worth understanding that this is not the bucket-to-bucket story. Two block volumes do not speak a protocol to each other; they are disks, and disks are copied at the filesystem level. The ordinary shape is to bring up the instance in ke-1a with its volume attached and formatted, move the data with rsync, and cut over — or use the database's own replication if you would rather measure the downtime in seconds. Snapshot the source before you start. Two things change afterwards that have nothing to do with disks: the bill arrives in shillings instead of moving with the exchange rate and a card issuer's margin, and the live data is in Kenya, which is the sections 48 and 49 point above.
Tell [email protected] how much data you would put on a volume, what is reading it today and roughly when you need it, and you will hear from us when there is something to attach. Migration planning and assistance are included at no extra charge.
FAQ
Questions, answered
Your instance's local storage lives and dies with the instance. A Block Storage volume is independent — detach it, reattach it to another instance, resize it live, and snapshot it. Delete the server and the volume, and your data, survives.
Standard SSD delivers up to 10,000 IOPS and suits web apps, dev environments, and small databases. High-Performance NVMe reaches 64,000 IOPS and 1 GB/s for demanding databases and real-time analytics. Standard HDD favours cheap throughput for logs, media, and backups.
Yes. Volumes resize instantly while attached and in use — then you extend the filesystem (resize2fs for ext4, xfs_growfs for XFS). Volumes can only grow, not shrink.
Snapshots are instant and incremental — only changed blocks are stored after the first one. Restore a volume to any snapshot, or clone a snapshot into a new volume. Snapshot storage bills at $0.15/GB per month.
Every volume is replicated three times across separate physical drives, and failed drives are reconstructed automatically. That yields 99.999% durability with a 99.99% availability SLA.
Yes. Use volumes as boot disks with custom OS images, resize the boot disk as you grow, and move a bootable volume between instances.
Yes. Volumes are encrypted with AES-256 before data touches disk, using platform-managed keys or your own via KMS. Data in transit is encrypted too.
You pay for provisioned size, metered hourly, whether or not the volume is attached — a 100 GB Standard SSD volume costs $25.30 a month. Billing stops when you delete the volume.
Volumes range from 10 GB (50 GB on HDD) up to 16 TB, with up to 16 volumes attached per instance. Account limits are raised on request.
In ke-1a, our Nairobi region. A volume is created in a region and stays there — it attaches to instances in that same region, and it does not leave Kenya unless you copy a snapshot out yourself.
It is in build and there is no public date. Send [email protected] the workload and the rough size you would need and you go on the list, and you hear from us when there is something to attach rather than when a calendar says so.
Indicative launch pricing is KES 25.30 per GB a month for Standard SSD, KES 42.50 for High-Performance NVMe and KES 15.00 for Standard HDD, billed on provisioned size and metered hourly, with snapshots billed separately. Prices exclude VAT. Those are the figures we expect to open with, published so you can build a forecast now.
Tell [email protected] what you would run on it and how much data is involved. Those conversations decide which tier and which sizes come first, and the teams having them are the ones we come back to when there is something to try.
Yes. Volumes created in ke-1a are held in Nairobi and are not moved out of the country without your instruction, which gives you data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act. Your obligations as a controller are unchanged.
Regulation 26(1) offers two routes for the six named purposes: processing through a server and data centre located in Kenya, or storing at least one serving copy in a data centre located in Kenya. An instance in Nairobi with its volumes in Nairobi is what the first route describes. Whether your specific processing falls inside Regulation 26 at all is a question for your counsel.
Because it lives and dies with the server, cannot be moved, and cannot grow past the plan it came with. A volume outlives the instance, detaches and reattaches to another machine in the same region, and resizes while it is mounted. The practical difference shows up on the day you want a bigger server, or the day you do not want that server any more.
Object storage is an S3 API you write buckets to over HTTP — right for archives, backups, KYC document images and anything a browser fetches. A block volume is a disk attached to one instance, with a filesystem on it, that your database reads and writes through ordinary file operations. Buckets hold what you keep; volumes hold what you are working on. Most Kenyan systems end up wanting both.
No — a block volume attaches to one instance at a time. Shared access across a fleet is what File Storage is for, and it is on the same launch path.
Cross-region snapshot copies are planned, on the same account as ke-1a. Treat personal data deliberately when you use them: a copy of Kenyan personal data in another country is a cross-border transfer, and the section 48 and 49 conditions apply to it. Application images and logs without personal data raise no such question.
In KES, with M-Pesa and other mobile money, bank transfer, or card — the same methods as the rest of your account. No foreign card and no forex conversion.
No. Displayed prices exclude VAT. Kenya's standard rate is 16%, administered by the Kenya Revenue Authority, and it is calculated and shown separately at checkout.
Yes. Creating, attaching, resizing and snapshotting are API and CLI operations on the same account and credentials as the rest of the platform, so a volume stays something your pipeline provisions rather than something somebody remembers to click.
Customer references are available under NDA for the products that are live today, object storage in ke-1a among them. Tell [email protected] what you are building and you will be pointed at the closest match.
Size it roughly — how much the database holds today, and how much it grew last year — and decide which tier the workload wants. Then send that to [email protected] or call +254 119 039 063, so the first release is shaped by the people actually waiting for it.
Persistent volumes are almost here
Block Storage is launching soon, close to your users and billed in local currency. Talk to us to line up early access and be first to attach a volume.
Launching soon · 99.999% durability · Billed in KES