Managed Databases — launching in Nairobi, ke-1a
Coming soonManaged Databases in Kenya
The loan book, the member register, the order table — in Nairobi, run for you.
Your application tier can live anywhere. The database is different: it holds the identity documents, the repayment history, the member records and the phone numbers, and it is the thing your customer's auditor asks about by name. Managed PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis and MariaDB are coming to ke-1a in Nairobi, with backups, patching, monitoring and failover handled — priced in shillings from KES 1,458 a month at launch. Join the waitlist and we will tell you the week it opens.
- Launching soon — join the waitlist for early access
- PostgreSQL · MySQL · MongoDB · Redis · MariaDB
- Hosted in Nairobi, ke-1a
- Data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act — your data stays in-country
- Quoted and billed in KES
Launching soon · Billed in KES
Pricing
One flat price per instance
Pick a size and engine — every plan includes automated backups, point-in-time recovery, and multi-AZ high availability. In your currency, no forex.
Small
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 1 vCPU
- 2 GB RAM
- 20 GB SSD included
- 100 connections
- Daily backups, 35-day PITR
Medium
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 2 vCPU
- 4 GB RAM
- 50 GB SSD included
- 200 connections
- Daily backups, 35-day PITR
Large
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 4 vCPU
- 8 GB RAM
- 100 GB NVMe included
- 500 connections
- Daily backups, 35-day PITR
XLarge
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 8 vCPU
- 16 GB RAM
- 200 GB NVMe included
- 1000 connections
- Daily backups, 35-day PITR
Every plan includes automated backups with 35-day point-in-time recovery, and multi-AZ high availability is available on all sizes. Additional storage is billed per GB. Prices exclude VAT; local currency figures are indicative and settled at checkout.
Where the database sits
One page view, thirty conversations with the database
A checkout page looks like one request. Behind it: the session lookup, the user record, the permission check, the cart, a query per line item because the ORM decided so, the stock check, the write, the audit row. Thirty round trips is an ordinary number, and every one of them pays the distance between your application and your database twice. That is why the database's location is a different decision from the web server's — a page served from Frankfurt is one long journey, but an application in Nairobi talking to a database in Frankfurt is thirty of them in series before a byte reaches the browser.
Kenya's traffic makes the point on its own. The Communications Authority counted 84.09 million active SIM subscriptions in the quarter to March 2026 — 157.7% penetration — with 62.63 million mobile data subscriptions and 50.17 million smartphones connected. Nearly all of those people are inside the country. So is ke-1a. A request that starts and finishes inside the Nairobi metro is typically around a 2 ms round trip, and Lineserve peers at KIXP, the neutral exchange TESPOK has run across four Nairobi facilities since 2002, so traffic between your instance and another of its 136 networks is handed over a few kilometres away.
It also matters where Kenyan bandwidth comes ashore. Every international subsea cable lands at Mombasa — SEACOM, EASSy, TEAMS, PEACE, DARE1 and LION2 — and that capacity is hauled roughly 480 km inland before it reaches a Nairobi rack. Anything leaving the country still makes that trip, and then makes it again coming back. Domestic traffic takes the other route entirely. Which of those two journeys your database queries depend on is decided by one field on a form.
At launch the shape most Kenyan teams will want is the one they already have half of: compute in ke-1a today, a managed database beside it when the service opens, connected over private networking rather than the public internet. The application tier is a problem you can solve this afternoon. The database is the part worth waiting a few weeks to stop maintaining yourself.
84.09M
Active mobile subscriptions in Kenya (CA, Q3 FY2025/26)
136
Networks peering at KIXP, Nairobi (PeeringDB)
~480 km
From the Mombasa cable landings to a Nairobi rack
5
Engines at launch — PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, MariaDB
Callbacks arrive from inside Kenya
A digital lender's Daraja integration, a merchant's payment notifications, a USSD gateway's session traffic — these originate on Kenyan networks and land on your endpoint, which then writes to your database. Keeping the receiving end in Nairobi keeps the whole path domestic, and a webhook receiver that cannot afford a cold start has one less ocean in it.
There is no cloud region here but this one class of them
No hyperscaler operates a full region in Kenya; the nearest are in South Africa. Nairobi has edge from the large providers — caching and interconnect — with the compute in another country. Edge serves a cached image. It does not hold a loan book. Managed Databases at launch is a database in Kenya rather than near it.
Payments
It will bill the way everything else on your account bills
Nothing bills until the service opens. When it does, a managed database joins the same Kenyan account, the same shilling invoice and the same payment methods as the compute you already run — which for most Kenyan buyers is the least surprising part of the whole product, and worth confirming anyway.
M-Pesa
Kenya is a mobile-money-first market, not a card market with mobile money bolted on: mobile money penetration passed 100.1% of population, with 53.4 million active subscriptions and 602,470 agents. M-Pesa is a supported method for Kenyan customers today and will be at launch, in shillings.
Bank transfer
The route almost every purchase with an approval behind it takes. A production database with a read replica, or a year taken up front at ten months for twelve, goes as one transfer with one reference your reconciliation picks up, rather than as a card charge somebody explains at month end.
Card
Visa and Mastercard, charged in shillings. No foreign card, no forex conversion and no international transaction on the statement — which is the point for a Kenyan finance team, whatever the amount.
Payment methods for Kenya are M-Pesa, bank transfer and card, all in KES. Displayed prices exclude VAT; 16% is calculated and shown separately at checkout.
The platform
Everything a production database needs
High availability, backups, security, and observability come wired in — so day two looks like day one.
Five engines
PostgreSQL 14–16, MySQL 8.0/8.1, MongoDB 6/7, Redis 6.2/7, and MariaDB 10.11/11 — your choice.
Multi-AZ high availability
Synchronous standbys across zones with automatic failover in under 60 seconds and zero data loss.
Automated backups & PITR
Daily backups plus continuous archiving — restore to any second within the last 35 days.
Read replicas
Add up to five read replicas with sub-second lag to scale reads and offload analytics.
Encryption everywhere
AES-256 encryption at rest and TLS 1.3 in transit, on by default for every instance.
VPC isolation
Private by default — databases live inside your VPC, reachable only from your own services.
Connection pooling
Built-in PgBouncer and ProxySQL keep thousands of client connections efficient and stable.
Performance insights
Slow-query analytics and live metrics surface the queries that need your attention.
Automated patching
Minor versions and security fixes applied during the maintenance window you choose.
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
Web & mobile backends
Managed PostgreSQL or MySQL that scales with you, so your app team never babysits a database.
E-commerce
Read replicas and connection pooling absorb traffic spikes without dropping a single order.
Caching & sessions
Managed Redis with sub-millisecond latency for sessions, queues, and hot data.
Content management
Run WordPress, Drupal, and custom apps on managed MySQL or PostgreSQL, kept patched and backed up.
How it works
From zero to database in three steps
Pick engine & size
Choose your engine, version, and instance size — from Small to XLarge.
Connect
Grab the connection string and connect — private by default, inside your VPC.
We keep it healthy
Backups, patching, failover, and monitoring — all handled, day and night.
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
Managed beats midnight maintenance
Running your own database on a VPS means backups you hope work, manual failovers, and patching at 2 a.m. This is the option where we do all of that for you.
What it will cost
Four sizes in shillings, and what your finance team will want on the invoice
The launch price list is four instance sizes. Small — 1 vCPU, 2 GB of RAM, 20 GB of SSD and up to 100 connections — opens at KES 1,458 a month. Medium is 2 vCPU, 4 GB and 50 GB with 200 connections at KES 2,916. Large is 4 vCPU, 8 GB and 100 GB of NVMe with 500 connections at KES 5,832, and XLarge is 8 vCPU, 16 GB and 200 GB of NVMe with 1,000 connections at KES 11,664. Those are Kenyan figures from a Kenyan price list, not a dollar rate converted at the moment the page loads, which is what makes a twelve-month forecast possible at all.
Two things shape the sizing conversation. Vertical scaling to a larger instance happens inside a brief maintenance window, so growing is a scheduled change rather than a migration — size for the traffic you have, not the traffic you hope for. And read replicas, up to five with typically under a second of lag, take read load off the primary with no downtime at all, which is normally the cheaper fix for the month-end report that has been flattening your database since February.
Then the invoice. Kenya's standard VAT rate is 16%, and the KRA's own list of taxable digital services names cloud backup, email hosting and software subscriptions — hosting is squarely in scope. Displayed prices exclude VAT and the 16% is calculated and shown separately at checkout, so the figure in your budget line and the figure on the quote are the same figure. VAT is due by the 20th of the following month, filed on VAT3 through iTax, and an input claim turns on the invoice carrying the right identifiers.
Send four things before you order, not in April
Your KRA PIN, your registered name exactly as the KRA holds it, a billing email that reaches finance rather than an engineer, and any purchase-order or cost-centre reference the document has to carry. Send them to [email protected] when you join the waitlist and the billing account is configured once instead of corrected later. Lineserve Limited is registered for VAT in Kenya.
What the price includes at launch
Daily automated backups with a 35-day point-in-time recovery window, manual snapshots on demand, minor-version and security patching inside a maintenance window you choose, AES-256 at rest and TLS 1.3 in transit, slow-query analytics, and connection pooling through PgBouncer or ProxySQL. High-availability instances replicate across zones with automatic failover behind a 99.99% uptime SLA.
Prices exclude VAT and are indicative launch pricing rather than an amount payable today. Annual billing runs ten months for twelve on eligible plans — ask [email protected] for a quotation against your budget cycle.
Data residency
The database is the part the Data Commissioner is asking about
Kenya's Data Protection Act, No. 24 of 2019 does not care where your company is registered. Section 4 applies it to anyone processing the personal data of data subjects located in Kenya, established here or not — so hosting abroad moves the data out of the country without moving you out of the Act. The regulator is the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner, and under section 18 no person may act as a data controller or processor without registering with it. The small-entity exemption — under KES 5 million turnover and fewer than ten employees — does not reach financial services, telecommunications, health, education, insurance, betting or public bodies, which is to say it does not reach most of the people reading this.
Sections 48 and 49 are where hosting location enters the picture. Transfer of personal data out of Kenya requires proof to the Data Commissioner of appropriate safeguards, or one of the narrow necessity grounds; sensitive personal data needs the data subject's consent and confirmed safeguards on top, and the Commissioner may prohibit, suspend or condition a transfer. Kenya does not ban sending data abroad. It attaches conditions and paperwork to it. Hold the database in Nairobi and that particular pile of work does not arise for what is in it.
Then there is the clause that turns a preference into a requirement. Section 50 lets the Cabinet Secretary prescribe processing that may only be effected through a server or data centre located in Kenya, and Regulation 26 of the 2021 General Regulations exercises that power. For six named strategic-interest purposes — civil registration and identity management, the conduct of elections, systems administering public finances, a computer system designated as protected under the Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act, basic education, and primary or secondary healthcare — at least one serving copy of that personal data belongs in a data centre located in Kenya. Respect how narrow that list is; where you are on it, it decides the architecture.
Put the database in ke-1a and your data is held in Nairobi, under Kenyan law, where your regulator can see it. That is data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act, and it is what a hosting provider supplies. Registration, the records of processing, the DPIA and the sign-off remain yours as controller — a shorter pile of work when the data never left.
Digital lenders have their own guidance note
The ODPC has published a Guidance Note for Digital Credit Providers, and digital credit is a restricted sector for registration purposes — a DCP registers regardless of size. Between the CBK's licensing regime and the ODPC's guidance, a Kenyan lender's loan book and KYC store is the single most examined database in this market. Where it physically sits is a question that gets asked in every funding round and every bank partnership.
A replica in Dar es Salaam or Lagos is a transfer
tz-1a and ng-1a will be one API call away on the same account, which makes standby copies easy to place carelessly. A copy of Kenyan personal data in another country engages sections 48 and 49. Schema migrations, application images and logs stripped of identifiers raise no such question — decide the line deliberately rather than by default.
Who runs here
The Kenyan databases that should be in Nairobi
Every one of these is a workload where the data is the regulated part and the schema is somebody's whole business. They are also the teams least able to spare an engineer for backups that have never been restored.
Digital lenders
The Central Bank has processed over 800 digital credit provider applications since the 2022 regulations, and the licensed register has grown every year since. The workload is unmistakable: a loan-book database that must reconcile exactly, a KYC document store, credit-scoring batch jobs over alternative data, and webhook receivers taking callbacks from inside Kenya. Managed Postgres at launch takes the backups, the patching and the failover off a team that would rather spend the hours on scoring. A Medium instance at KES 2,916 is where most lending backends start.
SACCOs and microfinance
Deposit-taking SACCOs are regulated by SASRA and are a distinctively Kenyan institution — core banking, member self-service portals, USSD and mobile channels, and a month-end and dividend run that wants real capacity for three days and ordinary capacity for twenty-seven. The member register is personal data about tens of thousands of Kenyans, held under Kenyan law. Read replicas absorb the statement-generation load without touching the primary that the tellers are on.
E-commerce and retail
Catalogue, cart, checkout, inventory sync, order history. The database is in the critical path of a purchase, and checkout latency is felt directly by someone standing in a shop or sitting on a matatu with one bar of signal. Payment callbacks land from Kenyan networks and write to the same tables. A managed MySQL or PostgreSQL in Nairobi keeps the whole transaction inside the country it happened in.
Newsrooms and publishers
Nairobi has an unusually strong media sector for a market its size, and its traffic pattern is a flat line with cliffs in it: election night, budget day, a verdict, a death. The database is what falls over first when a live blog goes viral. Read replicas and connection pooling are the two things that keep a WordPress or custom CMS answering during the hour that actually matters, and both come wired in at launch.
Health and education platforms
The two Regulation 26 categories most likely to be built by a private company rather than a ministry. A primary-care records system, a school management platform, a clinic booking service — all holding personal data inside a named strategic-interest purpose, all needing at least one serving copy in a data centre located in Kenya. A managed database in ke-1a is that copy, and saying so in a tender is worth more than a feature list.
Agencies, ISVs and the .ke long tail
Nairobi's agency and freelance scene is the main reseller channel in this market — one buyer, many client sites, and roughly 123,000 registered .ke domains behind them. The pattern at launch is one managed database per client rather than one shared MySQL nobody dares upgrade, with backups and patching handled centrally. Small instances at KES 1,458, several of them, is the shape.
ISPs, WISPs and network operators
RADIUS and AAA back-ends, billing and provisioning systems, NetFlow and monitoring stores. These databases are meaningless outside the country they serve, and the people running them will read a traceroute before they read a page like this one — which is the correct order. Small instances, several of them, close to the network they describe.
Customer references are available under NDA — ask [email protected] or call +254 119 039 063 and the team will arrange one against the sector you are buying for.
Migrating
What moving to this will look like at launch
From a database you run yourself on a VPS
This is where most Kenyan teams are starting from, and the data has the shortest distance to travel: it is already in Nairobi. What changes is who carries the pager. Daily backups with a 35-day recovery window instead of a cron job someone wrote in 2023 and nobody has restored from. Security patching inside a window you choose instead of a Saturday. Automatic failover across zones instead of a manual promotion at 02:00 with the CTO on the phone. The data path itself is a dump and restore, or logical replication where the downtime budget is tight, and migration planning comes at no extra charge. Ask us to map it before the service opens rather than after.
From a managed database in Europe
The mechanics are ordinary — seed the new instance, let replication catch up, cut over in your quietest hour, keep the old one read-only for a week. What changes afterwards is bigger than the server. Your application stops making thirty intercontinental round trips per page view. Your bill stops moving with the exchange rate and the card issuer's margin and becomes one shilling figure you can forecast. Your invoice starts carrying a KRA PIN. And the residency question your customers' security reviews keep raising gets a one-line answer: the database is in Nairobi, under Kenyan law.
There is one question that settles where a database really is, and it is worth asking of every provider you shortlist, this one included: which building is the machine in, and in which country is that building? For ke-1a the answer is Nairobi.
FAQ
Questions, answered
We run the database engine for you — provisioning, backups, patching, monitoring, and failover. You create an instance, get a connection string, and focus on your application.
PostgreSQL 14–16, MySQL 8.0 and 8.1, MongoDB 6.0 and 7.0, Redis 6.2 and 7.0, and MariaDB 10.11 and 11.0 — all with the same managed features.
HA instances replicate across availability zones. If the primary fails, an automatic failover promotes the standby — typically in under 60 seconds, with zero data loss — behind a 99.99% uptime SLA.
Daily automated backups are retained for 35 days with point-in-time recovery to any second in that window. You can also take manual snapshots whenever you like.
Up to five read-only copies of your primary that serve read queries, synced automatically with typically under a second of lag. Use them to scale read-heavy workloads without touching the primary.
Yes. Scale vertically to a larger size within a brief maintenance window, or horizontally by adding read replicas with no downtime at all.
Yes. AES-256 at rest and TLS 1.3 in transit, with platform-managed keys or your own via KMS.
Instances live in a private network with no public access by default. Reach them through security groups and database users, or peer your VPC and connect over VPN from on-premises.
Standard tools work directly — pg_dump and mysqldump for one-shot moves, or logical and binary-log replication for near-zero-downtime migrations. Our team helps plan the move at no charge.
The service is in build and not open for orders. Rather than publish a date that moves, we tell the waitlist directly — email [email protected] or call +254 119 039 063 with the engine and size you have in mind and you will hear when the first release is ready.
Not yet — there is no orderable instance today. What you can do now is size the workload with us, get launch pricing in writing against your account, and be in the first group given access when it opens. Teams with a migration to plan get the most out of starting early.
In ke-1a, our Nairobi region — the same region already running cloud servers, VPS, dedicated hardware and object storage. The instance and its storage are created there and stay there unless you move them yourself.
The launch price list runs from KES 1,458 a month for Small (1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 20 GB SSD, 100 connections) through KES 2,916 for Medium and KES 5,832 for Large to KES 11,664 for XLarge (8 vCPU, 16 GB RAM, 200 GB NVMe, 1,000 connections). Prices exclude VAT.
No. Those figures are indicative launch pricing, and nothing bills until the service opens. If your budget cycle needs a number sooner, ask [email protected] for a written quotation.
Yes. Kenyan customers pay by M-Pesa, bank transfer or card, all in shillings, and a managed database will bill on the same account and the same methods as the compute you already run.
No. Displayed prices exclude VAT. Kenya's rate on digital and hosting services is 16%, administered by the KRA, and it is calculated and shown separately at checkout.
PostgreSQL 14–16, MySQL 8.0 and 8.1, MongoDB 6.0 and 7.0, Redis 6.2 and 7.0, and MariaDB 10.11 and 11.0 — all with the same managed features rather than a tier per engine.
HA instances replicate across availability zones. If the primary fails, an automatic failover promotes the standby — typically in under 60 seconds, with zero data loss — behind a 99.99% uptime SLA.
Daily automated backups retained for 35 days with point-in-time recovery to any second inside that window, plus manual snapshots whenever you want one. Restoring one somewhere harmless on a quiet Tuesday is the exercise worth doing early.
Yes. Data in ke-1a is held in Nairobi and is not moved out of the country without your instruction, which gives you data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act.
It gives you the location, and the location is the part a hosting provider supplies. Registration with the ODPC, your records of processing and your own assessments stay with you as controller — they are simply a shorter piece of work when the personal data never left Kenya.
Basic education is one of the six strategic-interest purposes Regulation 26 names, alongside civil registration, elections, public finance systems, designated protected computer systems, and primary or secondary healthcare. Where it applies, at least one serving copy of that personal data belongs in a data centre located in Kenya. Whether your particular system falls inside it is a question for your own counsel — ke-1a is where the copy would run.
Yes, on the same account and API. Treat personal data deliberately when you do: a copy of Kenyan personal data in tz-1a or ng-1a is a transfer out of Kenya under sections 48 and 49. Application images, schema migrations and de-identified logs raise no such question.
Yes, at no extra charge, and the planning is better done before launch than after. Standard tools work directly — pg_dump and mysqldump for a one-shot move, logical or binary-log replication where you cannot afford the downtime. Send the engine, the size and where it runs today to [email protected].
Email [email protected], call +254 119 039 063, or use the contact form, with the engine, the rough size and what the database holds. No card, no commitment — it puts you in the first group given access and gets launch pricing written against your account.
Production databases, minus the ops
Managed Databases are launching soon. Talk to us to reserve early access and pricing in your local currency, with no card to start.
Launching soon · 99.99% uptime SLA · Billed in KES