File Storage — hosted in Nairobi
A shared file system in Nairobi
One directory, mounted by every server that needs it.
The moment a Kenyan business puts a second application server behind a load balancer, it inherits a problem it did not ask for: two machines, two copies of the uploads directory, and a client on the phone about a document that exists on one of them. The usual fixes are rsync on a cron, sessions pinned to a machine, or rewriting an application that was never going to be rewritten. Managed NFS gives every instance the same directory at the same time, with no file server to patch and no capacity to provision. It is coming to ke-1a in Nairobi, priced in shillings. Tell us what would mount it and we will tell you when it is ready.
- File systems in ke-1a, our Nairobi region
- NFSv4.1 with full POSIX semantics — your applications work unchanged
- Mounted by many servers at once, all seeing the same files
- Data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act — your data stays in-country
- Launching soon — priced and billed in KES
Launching soon · Billed in KES
Pricing
Pay for what you store, nothing more
Three storage classes, one per-GB price each. No pre-provisioning, no minimums — capacity follows your data, measured hourly. In your currency, no forex.
| Storage class | Price /GB/mo | Throughput | Latency |
|---|---|---|---|
| UniversalPopularGeneral-purpose shared storage for most workloads. | KES 21 | 100 MB/s, burst to 1 GB/s | ~2 ms |
| FastAnalytics, ML training data, media pipelines. | KES 36 | 500 MB/s, up to 10 GB/s provisioned | <1 ms |
| BasicInfrequently accessed files, archives, backups. | KES 2.4 | 100 MB/s | 10–50 ms |
You are billed on the data actually stored, measured hourly — there is no capacity to pre-provision. Fast provisioned throughput is $0.05 per MB/s, Basic reads are $0.01/GB, and snapshots are $0.05/GB/mo. Prices exclude VAT; local currency figures are indicative and settled at checkout.
Why Nairobi decides this
A bucket is fetched. A file system is mounted.
The distinction sounds academic until it costs you an afternoon. An object store is reached over HTTP, one request at a time, by a client that knows it is talking to a network service — so a slow bucket is a slow response, and a cache in front of it hides most of the distance from most readers. A mount behaves differently. Your application opens a path and the kernel makes the call on its behalf: a stat, a readdir, a lock, a small write, a metadata update. A directory listing a local disk answers instantly can be dozens of round trips underneath. A slow bucket is a slow page. A slow mount is a process that stops.
That is why the file system belongs beside the fleet that mounts it, on the region's private network, rather than anywhere convenient. And your fleet is already in Nairobi, because your users are: 2,656,653 fixed internet subscriptions in the quarter to March 2026 across Safaricom, Jamii Telecommunications, Wananchi's Zuku and Poa Internet, alongside a mobile base that reaches almost everybody else. Traffic between ke-1a and another network present at KIXP is exchanged inside Nairobi, where the Kenya Internet Exchange Point records 136 peer networks and 2.9 Tbps of capacity. The users' side of that is a familiar argument. The new part is that the servers answering them have to agree with each other about a directory, and agreeing takes a network too — a short, private, in-region one.
There is a second consequence worth designing around. A file system has no public endpoint: no browser reaches it, no partner integrates against it, nothing outside your private network enumerates it. Its clients are your own instances, with access points giving each application or client its own root and its own permissions. Buckets face the internet. File systems face your fleet.
NFSv4.1
Protocol, with full POSIX file locking and permissions
136
Networks peering at KIXP, Nairobi (PeeringDB)
1 PB
Ceiling the file system scales to, with nothing to provision
KES
Quoted, invoiced and settled — no forex on a monthly line
Where it sits next to the rest of the stack
Block storage is a disk for one instance — the database's data files, the boot volume, the thing a single process owns. Object storage is an S3 API for archives, backups and anything a browser fetches, and it is live in ke-1a today. File storage is the middle case, and it exists because a great many Kenyan applications were written before object storage was: shared directories, POSIX paths, file locks, and a fleet that has to agree about all of them.
The office can mount it too
Over a VPN or a direct link, a machine in your own building mounts the file system exactly as a cloud instance does. For a design studio, a picture desk or a records office with a working set on a NAS in the corner, that is how a migration starts — both sides mounted, nothing cut over, and the copy in Nairobi replicated across zones rather than sitting on one disk under a desk.
The platform
Everything shared storage should be
Managed, elastic, and replicated — mounted by your whole fleet, with no file server to run.
Fully managed
No NFS servers to provision, patch, or fail over — we run the whole file system for you.
Elastic scaling
Capacity grows and shrinks with your data, from gigabytes to a petabyte, with nothing to provision.
Multi-AZ replication
Every file is synchronously replicated across availability zones and survives the loss of a zone.
Unlimited concurrent mounts
Thousands of instances mount the same file system at once, with real-time consistency across them.
POSIX-compliant NFSv4.1
Full file locking, permissions, symlinks, and hard links — your apps work unchanged.
Encryption everywhere
AES-256 at rest and TLS in transit, with keys managed for you or brought yourself.
Lifecycle policies
Auto-tier cold files down to Basic and save up to 60% without moving a thing.
Snapshots
Instant, incremental snapshots let you restore a whole file system or a single file in seconds.
Access points
Per-tenant roots and permissions give each app or team its own view of the file system.
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 shared workloads
Shared web content
Every server sees the same uploads, themes, and media — no rsync, no drift, no sticky sessions.
Kubernetes RWX volumes
Many pods, one volume. The CSI driver gives you ReadWriteMany persistent volumes out of the box.
ML & analytics
Share datasets across GPU workers with high-throughput reads, no copying between nodes.
CI & dev environments
Shared source, build artifacts, and caches across runners and workspaces, live for every job.
How it works
Shared storage in three steps
Create a file system
Pick a storage class — Universal, Fast, or Basic. There is no size to provision.
Mount over NFS
Run one mount command on any instance — or request a RWX volume in Kubernetes.
Store and share
Capacity follows your data as it grows, and lifecycle policies tier cold files down.
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 NFS beats running your own
Running your own NFS server means patching, capacity planning, and failovers when a node dies. A managed, elastic file system takes all of that off your plate.
Pricing & invoicing
Nothing to provision, and a cold tail that prices itself
A file system has no size to choose. You do not provision one, you do not grow one, and there is no headroom to buy — capacity follows the data you actually store, measured hourly, from a few gigabytes up to a petabyte. That is the opposite of a block volume, which charges for the size you asked for whether or not you filled it, and it is why the two products end up on the same account doing different jobs. On a shared drive it is also the fairer shape, because nobody can predict what a directory a hundred people write to will hold in eighteen months.
Three classes carry three shilling prices: Universal at an indicative KES 21.00 per GB a month, Fast at KES 36.00 where throughput is the constraint, and Basic at KES 2.40 for files that are kept rather than used. The relationship between them is where the money is. Every real shared drive is mostly cold — a working set the fleet touches constantly, and a long tail of finished projects, old exports and last year's scans nobody has opened in months. Lifecycle policies move that tail to Basic automatically after a period you choose, cutting the cost of holding it by up to 60%, at the same paths, with no application aware anything happened.
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 match. 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 here because shared 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.
Set the lifecycle policy in the first week
On a shared drive the cold tail always wins in the end. A tiering policy applied to a hundred gigabytes is a configuration change; the same policy applied to forty terabytes two years later is a project with a review meeting attached and somebody nervous about which folders it will touch.
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, so a small monthly line sits naturally on a wallet and an 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.
Data residency
The folder nobody owns is the one the Act cares most about
Every organisation has one. It started as a place to put a scan, and now it holds signed agreements, identity documents, payslips somebody attached to a loan file, photographs of members, an export generated for a board paper in 2023, and a directory called handover that four people have written to. Nobody decided any of it. It accumulated, because a shared directory is the easiest thing in the building to write to — and it is very often the largest pile of personal data a Kenyan business holds.
Kenya's Data Protection Act, No. 24 of 2019 is enforced by the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner, and section 49 is where that pile gets interesting. Transfers out of Kenya are governed generally by section 48; section 49(1) is stricter for sensitive personal data, permitting transfer only on the data subject's consent and confirmation of appropriate safeguards, and section 49(3) lets the Data Commissioner prohibit, suspend or condition a transfer. Now look again at what is actually in a shared document store. Identity documents. Health records. Financial position. Those are the categories the stricter test was written for, and the ones least likely to have been inventoried.
Section 4(b) closes the other door: the Act applies to a controller or processor not established or ordinarily resident in Kenya but processing personal data of data subjects located in Kenya. Moving the share to a European provider moves the files and leaves the duty exactly where it was, with a transfer analysis added on top. A file system in ke-1a produces no such analysis for the data on it, because nothing crossed a border.
Regulation 26 of the 2021 General Regulations reaches further still for six named purposes, requiring processing through a server and data centre in Kenya, or at least one serving copy stored in a data centre in Kenya. A shared directory read continuously by a running application is a serving copy in the ordinary sense of the phrase, and programmes delivering basic education or primary and secondary health care meet that provision more often than their architects expect.
At launch, a file system created in ke-1a will be held in Nairobi and will not leave Kenya without your instruction — data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act. Compliance under the Act stays with you as the controller, and entities in restricted sectors register with the ODPC regardless of size: financial services, telecommunications, health, education, insurance, betting, public bodies and religious organisations. If you are in one of those, where your processor keeps your shared files is part of your own filing.
Access points are the control you will actually use
Per-client and per-application roots with their own permissions give each tenant its own view of the file system, so the boundary between one client's documents and another's is enforced by configuration rather than by a naming convention and everybody's good intentions. On a multi-tenant share that is the difference between an access control model and a folder structure.
Replication is durability, not a second country
A file system is replicated across availability zones inside the region at no extra cost, which protects against the loss of a zone. Cross-region replication to Dar es Salaam or Lagos is a different decision: a copy of Kenyan personal data in another country, with sections 48 and 49 applying to it. Both are legitimate. Only one belongs in a document.
Tiering changes the price, not the place
Cold files move down to the Basic class inside the same file system, in the same region, at the same paths. Somebody will eventually ask whether the archiving policy created a transfer. It did not, and it is worth being able to say so in one sentence.
Who is asking for this
The Kenyan teams that need one directory in several places
The pattern is a fleet rather than a server. Several machines, or several applications, have to read and write the same files — and the application expects a path rather than an API.
Agencies running many client sites off shared assets
Nairobi's agency and freelance scene is the reseller channel in this market, and its storage problem is specific: a dozen WordPress or Laravel sites, each with an uploads directory, themes and plugin trees that have to be identical across web servers and staging, and a handover pile at the end of every project. One file system with an access point per client gives every instance the same paths, makes adding a second web server a scaling decision rather than a data migration, and keeps the media where a client's own procurement form says it should be.
Digital lenders and the document store several systems read
The Central Bank licenses Digital Credit Providers under its 2022 regulations, and the systems around a loan book multiply quickly: a scoring service, an agent or customer portal, a collections tool, a reporting job and an audit export, all wanting the same identity scans, signed agreements and statement PDFs. Copying that pile into each application is how it ends up in five places and gets deleted from four. One mounted store, with per-application roots, keeps a single copy in Nairobi and puts section 49's sensitive-data question to bed for it.
SACCOs and the month-end paperwork
Deposit-taking SACCOs regulated by SASRA generate documents in bursts: statements, dividend notices, member correspondence, branch scans and the supporting files behind a month-end run. The generation is a fleet job and the reading is a branch-and-portal job, which is precisely the shape a shared file system is for — and member paperwork is exactly the data a Kenyan regulator asks the location of.
Newsrooms and the picture desk
Nairobi's media sector runs an unusual calendar — a general election every five years in August, budget day in June, exam results — and behind the published page is a working set several systems touch at once: the CMS, the transcoder, the desk editing on a workstation over VPN, the archive nobody deletes from. The Fast class handles the pipeline while it is hot; lifecycle policies drop last season's material to Basic automatically, at the same paths.
Health and education programmes
DHIS2 attachments, KoboToolbox and ODK submissions with photographs attached, M&E exports, county health and school management systems — read by a dashboard, a reporting job and a caseworker's application at the same time. Where a programme delivers basic education or primary and secondary health care, Regulation 26 applies to that processing directly, and a file system in Nairobi is the answer to the location half of it.
E-commerce fleets with a filesystem habit
The modern answer for product photography is a bucket, and object storage is live in ke-1a today for exactly that. What a mount solves is the application that will not be rewritten this quarter: a WooCommerce or Magento estate that writes to a media path, generates thumbnails on disk, and now needs a second web server for the December weeks. Mount the same path on both and the second server is a capacity decision rather than a project.
ISPs, WISPs and MSPs
Configuration backups, firmware images, provisioning templates and monitoring outputs that several machines and several engineers reach for during the same maintenance window. Small, shared, constantly rewritten, and useless outside the country they serve. A mount is what turns them into infrastructure rather than whichever engineer's home directory they were first put in.
Indicative launch pricing in shillings: Universal at KES 21.00 per GB a month, Fast at KES 36.00 and Basic at KES 2.40, billed on the data actually stored and measured hourly. Prices exclude VAT. These are the launch figures rather than a charge you can incur today.
Planning ahead
How your shared files get to Nairobi when this lands
From rsync, sticky sessions and one machine everybody mounts
Most Kenyan fleets that need this already have a workaround, and the workaround is why somebody is reading the page. Files synchronised between web servers on a cron, with a window in which the two disagree and a support ticket in the middle of it. Sessions pinned to a machine so a user keeps finding their own upload. Or one server everybody NFS-mounts from — a file server you patch, monitor and fail over yourself, on a disk with no replication behind it. At launch, the move is to create a file system, mount it at the same path on every instance, copy the current contents across once, and delete the cron. What goes away is not a storage cost, it is a category of bug that only shows up under load.
From an office NAS or a drive under a desk
The other common Kenyan starting point, and rarely a technology decision — it is where the files ended up. A NAS in the server room, an external disk beside it, and a working set that depends on the building being open, powered and dry. Mounting the file system alongside it over a VPN turns the move into a change of habit rather than a cutover: both sides mounted, the Nairobi copy replicated across zones, and the old one retired once nobody has written to it for a month. Access points and permissions replace the folder conventions on the way through.
Tell [email protected] how much the share holds, how much of it was last touched more than a month ago, and how many machines would mount it, and you will hear from us when there is something to mount. Migration planning and assistance are included at no extra charge.
FAQ
Questions, answered
A Block Storage volume attaches to one instance, like a disk. A file system mounts on thousands of instances at once over NFS, with every mount seeing the same files in real time. Use Block for databases; use File when fleets share data.
NFSv4.1 with full POSIX semantics — file locking, permissions, hard and symbolic links. Any Linux distribution mounts it natively; macOS and Windows work through their NFS clients.
There's nothing to provision. The file system grows and shrinks with the data you store, from gigabytes to a petabyte, and you pay only for what you actually use, measured hourly.
Yes. The CSI driver supports dynamic provisioning and ReadWriteMany (RWX) volumes, so many pods across many nodes can share the same persistent volume.
Universal gives a 100 MB/s baseline with bursts to 1 GB/s — right for most workloads. Fast starts at 500 MB/s with provisioned throughput up to 10 GB/s and sub-millisecond latency for analytics, ML training, and media pipelines.
Set a policy and files that go unused — say for 30 days — move automatically to the cheaper Basic class, cutting storage costs by up to 60%. The move is transparent; applications keep the same paths.
Yes. Every file system is replicated across multiple availability zones within the region at no extra cost, backed by a 99.99% availability SLA. Cross-region replication is available for disaster recovery.
Point-in-time snapshots are instant and incremental. Restore individual files from a read-only mount or roll back the whole file system, on demand or on a schedule.
Yes. Connect over VPN or a direct link and on-prem machines mount the file system exactly like cloud instances — useful for hybrid setups and migrations.
In ke-1a, our Nairobi region. A file system lives in one region and is mounted by instances in that region, and it does not leave Kenya without your instruction.
It is in build and there is no public date. Send [email protected] what would mount it and roughly how much data is involved and you go on the list — you hear from us when there is something to mount rather than when a calendar says so.
Indicative launch pricing is KES 21.00 per GB a month for Universal, KES 36.00 for Fast and KES 2.40 for Basic, billed on the data actually stored and measured hourly, with nothing to provision and no minimum. Prices exclude VAT. Those are the figures we expect to open with, published so you can plan against them.
Tell [email protected] what would mount it, how many instances, and how much data the share holds today. Those conversations decide what comes first, and the teams having them are the ones we come back to when there is something to try.
Object storage is an S3 API reached over HTTP, and using it means your application makes API calls — right for archives, backups, KYC document images and anything a browser fetches. File storage is a mounted directory: the application opens a path, takes a lock, writes a file, and changes nothing. Use a bucket for what you keep and serve; use a file system when several of your own servers must share the same folder.
A block volume attaches to one instance at a time, like a disk, which is what a database wants. A file system is mounted by many instances at once, all seeing the same files in real time. One process owning the data is block; a fleet sharing it is file.
Almost certainly not. It is NFSv4.1 with full POSIX semantics — file locking, permissions, symbolic and hard links — so a Linux instance mounts it natively and the application sees an ordinary directory at an ordinary path. That is the reason this product exists alongside object storage rather than instead of it.
Thousands, concurrently, with every mount seeing the same files in real time. Adding a web server stops being a data decision, which is the point of it for anyone running a fleet behind a load balancer.
Yes. A file system created 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. Your obligations as a controller are unchanged.
It raises the stakes on where it is. Section 49 of the Data Protection Act applies a stricter test to transfers of sensitive personal data out of Kenya than section 48 applies generally, and identity, health and financial documents are squarely in that category. A file system in Nairobi means that question does not arise for the files on it. Your own duties as controller, including registration if you are in a restricted sector, are unchanged.
No. Tiering moves a cold file to the Basic class inside the same file system, in the same region, at the same path. It changes the price of holding it and nothing else.
Yes, over a VPN or a direct link, exactly as a cloud instance does. That is the usual way a move off an office NAS begins — both sides mounted, nothing cut over, and the Nairobi copy replicated across zones rather than sitting on one disk.
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.
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.
Work out three numbers: how much the shared directory holds, how much of it has not been touched in a month, and how many machines would mount it. Send those to [email protected] or call +254 119 039 063, so the first release is shaped by the people actually waiting for it.
Shared storage for your whole fleet, almost here
Managed NFS is launching soon, close to your users. Talk to us for early access, and pay in local currency with no card required to start.
Launching soon · 99.99% availability SLA · Billed in KES