Dedicated Servers — hosted in Nairobi
Dedicated Servers in Kenya. The whole machine, yours alone.
Single-tenant dedicated servers, built to your spec.
Buying dedicated servers in Kenya used to mean a purchase order, a customs agent, and a cupboard in the office with a UPS in front of it. Renting one means a monthly line item, hardware that someone else replaces when a disk dies, and no capital sitting on your balance sheet depreciating. Every core, every gigabyte and every disk belongs to one tenant. There is no hypervisor between you and the hardware, and no other customer on it.
- 100% dedicated hardware — full cores, full memory, full disks
- Billed in KES — M-Pesa, bank transfer or card, no forex conversion
- Nairobi region ke-1a, plus Dar es Salaam and Lagos
- Data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act — your data stays in-country
- 99.9% uptime SLA with hardware replacement
Billed in KES · Colocation-grade hardware
Need elastic, instant compute instead? See Cloud ServersConfigurations
Pick a build, or spec your own
Ready configurations you can bring online in hours, or a custom build to exact spec on a short lead time. Priced monthly, billed in your currency, on a full-machine basis — nothing shared, nothing oversold.
LineServe Core 1
Entry-level bare metal.
+ KES 14,850 one-time setup
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 16 cores / 32 threads
- 32 GB RAM
- 2 × 480 GB SSD (RAID-1)
- 100 Mbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
- Out-of-band (IPMI)
LineServe Core 2
Databases and busy sites.
+ KES 14,850 one-time setup
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 24 cores / 48 threads
- 64 GB RAM
- 2 × 960 GB SSD (RAID-1)
- 100 Mbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
- Out-of-band (IPMI)
LineServe Core 3
High-performance workloads.
+ KES 22,350 one-time setup
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 32 cores / 64 threads
- 128 GB RAM
- 2 × 1.92 TB SSD (RAID-1)
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
- Out-of-band (IPMI)
LineServe Core 4
Enterprise applications.
+ KES 22,350 one-time setup
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 36 cores / 72 threads
- 256 GB RAM
- 2 × 3.84 TB SSD (RAID-1)
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
- Out-of-band (IPMI)
LineServe Core 5
High-capacity workloads.
+ KES 29,850 one-time setup
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 40 cores / 80 threads
- 512 GB RAM
- 2 × 7.68 TB SSD (RAID-1)
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
- Out-of-band (IPMI)
LineServe Core 6
Maximum performance.
+ KES 29,850 one-time setup
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 44 cores / 88 threads
- 1 TB RAM
- 2 × 15.36 TB SSD (RAID-1)
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
- Out-of-band (IPMI)
Custom
Anything beyond Core 6.
- Your choice of CPU
- Your choice of RAM
- Your choice of storage
- Custom transfer
- Custom IPv4
- Out-of-band (IPMI)
Prices exclude VAT. The one-time setup fee covers racking, cabling, burn-in, and OS install. Ready configs go live in hours subject to stock; custom builds are quoted with a lead time. Local currency figures are indicative and confirmed on your quote.
Network
Nairobi, and the 480 kilometres behind it
Kenya's international capacity does not arrive in Nairobi. It arrives in Mombasa. Six subsea systems land on the coast — TEAMS, SEACOM, EASSy, LION2, DARE1 and PEACE — and every bit of that capacity is then carried roughly 480 kilometres inland over terrestrial fibre before it reaches a Nairobi rack. For January–March 2026 the Communications Authority reported 28,130 Gbps lit against 17,759 Gbps utilised. Capacity is not Kenya's constraint. Distance is.
Inside Nairobi, the exchange point is KIXP, operated by TESPOK across four facilities in the city, with 136 peer networks and 2.9 Tbps of combined capacity recorded on PeeringDB. Lineserve peers at KIXP, so traffic between ke-1a and another network present there is exchanged inside Nairobi rather than hauled to Europe and back. Your users reach you over Safaricom Home Fibre, Faiba, Zuku, Poa, Mawingu or Liquid on the fixed side and over Safaricom and Airtel on mobile — all of them inside Kenya, and so is your machine. A request from a Faiba line in Kilimani is exchanged at KIXP and answered by hardware that belongs to you alone, in the same city, without going anywhere near the 480 kilometres to the coast.
2.66M
Fixed subscriptions in Kenya (CA, Q1 2026)
28,130 Gbps
Lit international capacity (CA, Q1 2026)
480 km
Mombasa landing to Nairobi backhaul
136
Networks peering at KIXP, Nairobi (PeeringDB)
Payments
Paying for a machine, not a subscription
A dedicated server invoice is a different size of payment from a VPS one: the first month carries a one-time setup fee on top of the monthly rate. That matters in Kenya specifically, because the rail most businesses reach for first has transaction ceilings a rack-scale invoice can run into. Kenya is a mobile-money-first market rather than a card market with mobile money bolted on — penetration sits at 100.1% of the population, with 53.4 million active subscriptions and 602,470 registered agents, and M-Pesa holds 89.1% of it. Everything below is billed in KES, so no foreign card and no forex conversion is involved.
M-Pesa and other mobile money
The default rail in this market, in shillings, for monthly renewals and for the smaller configurations.
Bank transfer
The practical rail for a first payment that includes setup, for the larger Core builds, and for an annual prepayment — one approval, one movement of money, one reference for your accounts.
Card
Visa and Mastercard, in KES, where a card is what your finance process expects. It is the option here rather than the assumption.
Mobile-money ceilings differ by customer and by tier. If you are not certain your first payment fits inside a single transaction, ask [email protected] before you order and we will confirm which rail to use.
What you get
Every resource, dedicated to you
No hypervisor tax, no noisy neighbors, no contention. A dedicated server delivers its full hardware to one tenant — you — every second of the month.
100% dedicated hardware
Full cores, full memory, full disks. Nothing is shared, virtualized, or oversold.
Predictable performance
No neighbors competing for CPU or I/O, so throughput stays consistent under load.
NVMe & RAID
Enterprise NVMe with hardware or software RAID for speed and redundancy you configure.
Out-of-band management
Full IPMI/BMC access to power-cycle, reinstall, and reach the console any time.
Any OS, or bring your own
Install any Linux distribution, Windows Server, or a hypervisor of your choice.
Custom configurations
Tune cores, memory, storage, and RAID to your workload — or start from a ready build.
Free DDoS protection
Always-on network-layer mitigation included at no extra cost.
Private networking
Connect dedicated and cloud resources on isolated internal networks within a region.
Colocation-grade hardware
Enterprise servers in Tier III facilities, maintained and monitored by our team.
Regions
Bare metal, close to your users
Place your hardware in the region nearest the people it serves. Your data held in the country you deploy to, in Tier III facilities.
Kenya
Nairobi · ke-1a
~2 ms
typical, within metro
Nairobi metro
Tanzania
Dar es Salaam · tz-1a
~6 ms
typical, within metro
Dar es Salaam metro
Nigeria
Lagos · ng-1a
~4 ms
typical, within metro
Lagos metro
Stock and lead times vary by region — a config not held in stock locally is built to order.
Build to spec
Configure it exactly the way you need
Start from a ready build and adjust, or spec a machine from the ground up. Tell us the shape of your workload and we'll build the hardware to match.
Processor
Choose core count and clock for your workload — from efficient 8-core builds to 64-core density.
Memory
Scale RAM to fit databases, caches, and virtualization, up to 512 GB and beyond on request.
Storage & RAID
Mix NVMe and SSD, set RAID levels, and size capacity for speed, redundancy, or both.
Add-ons
Extra IPv4s, additional bandwidth, managed OS, and backup targets, added to any build.
Not sure where to start? Tell us your workload and target budget, and we'll propose a build.
Talk to SalesUse cases
When you need the whole machine
High-performance databases
Give SQL Server, PostgreSQL, or MySQL every core and all the I/O, uncontended.
Virtualization & private cloud
Run your own hypervisor and carve up dedicated hardware exactly as you like.
High-traffic applications
Sustained, predictable throughput for busy platforms that can't tolerate contention.
Isolation & compliance
Single-tenant hardware for workloads with strict data-isolation requirements.
How it works
From spec to server
Choose region & configuration
Pick a region and a ready build, or configure a machine to spec.
We provision the hardware
Ready configs come online in hours; custom builds are assembled and tested to spec.
Take control
Get out-of-band access and root, install your OS, and run it your way.
Uptime SLA
99.9%
- Failed hardware replaced under SLA, with proactive monitoring
- Service credits applied automatically when we miss the SLA
- Tier III colocation facilities across all live regions
Support & reliability
Hardware backed, locally supported
Enterprise hardware in Tier III facilities, monitored by our team, and backed by a 99.9% uptime SLA with hardware replacement. Reach a real engineer in your region and timezone.
Kenya
+254 119 039 063Sales
[email protected]Which do you need?
Dedicated or cloud — pick the right tool
Both run on our network, in our regions, with local billing and support. The difference is the hardware model. Here's how to choose.
Tax & invoicing
The invoice, and the capex question behind it
This is where renting and buying diverge for a Kenyan business, and it is the part of the decision a finance manager owns rather than an engineer. Kenya's standard VAT rate is 16%, and the Kenya Revenue Authority's own list of taxable digital services names cloud backup, email hosting and software subscriptions — hosting is squarely in scope. VAT is due by the 20th of the following month, on whichever of invoiced, performed or paid comes first, and is filed on a VAT3 return through iTax.
What decides whether that VAT is a cost or a wash is the invoice. A valid Kenyan tax invoice carries the seller's KRA PIN and registered name, a unique invoice number, the buyer's own KRA PIN on a business-to-business sale, the item description and taxable value, the VAT charged as a separate line, the date, and the control number and QR code returned when the invoice is transmitted. Without a tax invoice carrying their own PIN, a Kenyan business cannot claim the input VAT or cleanly support the expense — and almost no hosting provider selling into Kenya addresses that on the page at all.
The other half of the comparison is the shape of the cost, not its size. A purchased server is a capital item you own, depreciate and eventually replace, with a disposal at the end of it. A rented one is a monthly operating cost with an invoice attached each month, no residual value to write down and nothing to dispose of. Which of those is better for your accounts depends on your own capital allowance position. Put both shapes in front of your accountant before you decide: one KES figure every month, against one large KES figure now plus everything that follows a purchase for the next five years.
Bring your invoicing requirements to [email protected] before you order, particularly if you are signing a twelve-month commitment, so the document arrives in the form your accountant needs from the first month rather than the third.
Data residency
Where the data sits, and when Kenyan law cares
Kenya's Data Protection Act, No. 24 of 2019 is administered by the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner, and two things in it matter to somebody choosing where to put a database on a single-tenant box. First, the Act reaches you wherever you host: section 4(b) applies it to a controller or processor not established or ordinarily resident in Kenya but processing personal data of data subjects located in Kenya. Hosting abroad does not move a Kenyan business outside Kenyan data protection law. It only moves the data.
Second, sending personal data out of Kenya is conditional rather than forbidden. Section 48 permits transfer where appropriate safeguards have been evidenced to the Data Commissioner, or where the transfer is necessary for contract performance and a short list of other grounds; section 49 requires both consent and confirmation of appropriate safeguards for sensitive personal data, and lets the Commissioner prohibit, suspend or condition a transfer. Keep the data on a machine in Nairobi and the transfer question never opens: nothing to evidence to the Commissioner, no consent to gather under section 49, nothing for anyone to suspend mid-quarter. A whole branch of the analysis closes before you reach it.
The one case where Kenyan law goes further
Regulation 26 of the Data Protection (General) Regulations, 2021, made under section 50 of the Act, requires a controller or processor handling personal data for a listed strategic-interest purpose either to process it through a server and data centre located in Kenya, or to store at least one serving copy in a data centre located in Kenya. The listed purposes are civil registration and legal identity management; the conduct of elections; overseeing any system for administering public finances by a state organ; running any system designated a protected computer system 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. If your workload is on that list, a single-tenant machine in ke-1a is a direct answer to it. If it is not, Regulation 26 does not apply to you, and any vendor telling you Kenyan law requires all Kenyan data to stay in Kenya is overstating it. Whether your own processing falls inside those categories is a question for your counsel, not for a hosting provider.
What Lineserve provides is location: data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act, with your data held in Nairobi and not moved out of Kenya without your instruction. On a single-tenant machine that is as precise as location gets — your database, on your disks, in one Nairobi building. Compliance is the controller's obligation and stays with you.
Who runs here
The Kenyan workloads that need the whole machine
Dedicated hardware is the right answer when a workload is sustained, heavy, and cannot tolerate a neighbour. In Kenya, a few shapes of buyer recur.
SACCOs and microfinance
Deposit-taking SACCOs are a distinctly Kenyan institution, regulated by SASRA, and their core banking systems are exactly the workload that suffers on shared infrastructure: a database that wants all the I/O, month-end and dividend-run batch processing that saturates every core for hours, member self-service portals and Paybill reconciliation jobs. A mid-range Core build with RAID-1 SSD and out-of-band IPMI is a closer fit than any number of virtual machines.
Digital credit providers
The Central Bank licenses digital credit providers under its 2022 regulations, and the ODPC has published guidance specifically for them. The workloads are unforgiving: Daraja callback receivers that cannot cold-start, credit-scoring batch jobs over alternative data, KYC document stores, loan-book databases and USSD gateway backends. Because the callbacks originate in Kenya, so should the endpoint receiving them. Digital lenders also sit in a restricted sector for ODPC registration and must register regardless of size.
News and publishing
Nairobi's media sector is unusually large for the size of the market, and its traffic pattern is not steady — election nights, budget day in June, exam results, each a single day that arrives all at once. A dedicated database and cache tier behind the front end is how those days stay boring.
ISPs, WISPs and managed service providers
Behind Safaricom and Faiba, the Communications Authority's fixed-ISP table has a long tail of regional operators. Their RADIUS and AAA, billing and provisioning stacks, recursive resolvers, NetFlow collectors, LibreNMS and Zabbix instances, speedtest endpoints and looking glasses all have to be in-country to be useful at all — and most of these teams want a physical box with IPMI rather than a shared instance.
NGOs, donor programmes and county government
Nairobi holds a large concentration of NGO and UN regional offices alongside county and parastatal IT: DHIS2 deployments, KoboToolbox and ODK survey servers, monitoring-and-evaluation dashboards, county revenue systems. This is the segment where Regulation 26's basic education, primary and secondary health care, and public finance categories actually bite.
Migrating
From a box in the office, or from a provider abroad
From hardware you own
The honest comparison is not the sticker price of a server against a monthly rental. It is the sticker price plus everything that comes with keeping a machine alive on your own premises: continuous power and the equipment that provides it, cooling, physical access control, a spares shelf, somebody who can be in the room at 03:00, and the several weeks between ordering hardware and having it racked. Renting converts that list into one KES figure a month. Two numbers from your own records settle the argument faster than any vendor's slide: what the current server cost to land in Kenya with duty and freight included, and what you spent last year keeping it alive.
From a provider abroad
The arguments are currency, distance and the invoice, in that order. You are billed in KES rather than in dollars on a card carrying a conversion spread and a foreign-transaction fee on every renewal, so the number your finance team reconciles is the number they approved. The machine is in Nairobi rather than across an ocean, which is a straightforward improvement for Kenyan users and a straightforward non-improvement for European ones. And support answers inside East Africa Time, on a Nairobi number, in your own working day.
Local hosting competes hard on price and on .ke bundling, and a Nairobi data centre, a Kenyan IP and M-Pesa billing are table stakes here rather than differentiators. Four questions actually separate providers, and they are worth putting to us as well: which networks and exchange points are you adjacent to and under which ASN; what is the measured latency from your network to Safaricom and Faiba; what does the uptime SLA pay out when it is missed; and does the invoice carry my KRA PIN. Ask all four in writing, of us and of everyone else on the shortlist, and decide on the answers rather than on the brochure.
FAQ
Questions, answered
Ready configurations that are in stock come online within hours. Custom builds are quoted with a short lead time while we assemble and test the exact hardware you specified.
Yes. A dedicated server is single-tenant — every core, gigabyte, and disk belongs to your machine alone. Nothing is shared, virtualized, or oversold.
Absolutely. Install VMware, Proxmox, or any hypervisor and partition the hardware however you like. It's your machine.
Any Linux distribution, Windows Server, or a hypervisor of your choice. You can also bring your own image.
Yes. Every server includes IPMI/BMC access so you can power-cycle, reinstall, and reach the console independently of the operating system.
Yes. Adjust CPU, memory, storage, and RAID, and add IPv4s, bandwidth, or managed services. Tell us your workload and we'll propose a build.
Yes, as an add-on. We can handle OS management, patching, and monitoring so your team can focus on the application rather than the hardware.
In ke-1a, our Nairobi region. Kenya is also the only Lineserve market with a local registered address — Utalii Lane, View Park Towers, Nairobi. That is the office in the CBD where you can find a person; your machine lives in the ke-1a facility across town, in the same city.
Kenyan customers pay in KES with M-Pesa and other mobile money, bank transfer, or card. A first payment includes the one-time setup fee, so it is larger than the monthly rate — if you are not sure it fits inside a single mobile-money transaction, ask sales before you order and use a transfer if it does not.
Yes. Your data is hosted in Kenya and stays in-country, which gives you data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act. It is not moved out of Kenya without your instruction.
Not generally. Regulation 26 of the Data Protection (General) Regulations, 2021 requires a server or data centre in Kenya — or at least one serving copy in one — for six named purposes: civil registration and identity management, elections, public finance systems administered by a state organ, designated protected computer systems, early childhood and basic education, and primary or secondary health care. Outside those categories the requirement does not apply to you.
Ready Core configurations that are in stock come online within hours. Custom builds are quoted with a short lead time while the exact hardware is assembled and tested.
Yes. Every machine includes IPMI/BMC access, so you can power-cycle, reinstall and reach the console independently of the operating system, plus full root on whatever you install.
Yes — Windows Server, any Linux distribution, or a hypervisor of your choice. You can bring your own image.
A dedicated server is single-tenant and physical: full uncontended cores, memory and disks, custom hardware and RAID, out-of-band access, and provisioning in hours. A Cloud Server is virtualised, resizes in a click and comes online in under a minute. Sustained and heavy points to the first; variable and elastic points to the second.
Yes — that is colocation, a separate product with its own rack, power and cross-connect terms, available in the same regions. See the colocation page for what a rack unit includes.
Yes. ke-1a in Nairobi, tz-1a in Dar es Salaam and ng-1a in Lagos are all live on one account, and dedicated and cloud resources can be joined over private networking inside a region. If personal data is going to leave Kenya, read sections 48 and 49 of the Data Protection Act first.
+254 119 039 063, alongside [email protected] and the ticket system. Kenya is on East Africa Time year-round with no daylight saving, so business hours mean the same thing every month of the year.
Build the machine your workload deserves
Single-tenant hardware, configured to spec, running close to your users — with local billing and support. Ready configs online in hours.
99.9% uptime SLA · Colocation-grade hardware · Billed in KES