Hosted in Nairobi — ke-1a
VPS Hosting in Kenya
Linux or Windows, live in 60 seconds.
VPS hosting in Kenya, on servers that sit in Nairobi rather than Europe. Requests from your Kenyan users reach the machine without crossing an ocean first. You get full root on Linux or full administrator rights over RDP on Windows, NVMe storage, a dedicated IPv4 and a free /64 IPv6 — and you pay in shillings, with M-Pesa, bank transfer or card. No dollar card, no forex conversion, no international transaction on your statement.
- Deploy in under 60 seconds
- 99.9% uptime SLA
- Three locally-hosted regions — Nairobi, Dar es Salaam & Lagos
- Data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act — your data stays in-country
- Free DDoS protection
No credit card required · Billed in KES
Pricing
Linux and Windows plans, billed in your currency
Windows licensing included on every Windows plan. Pay in local currency — no cards, no forex surprises. Annual billing gets you two months free.
Linux VPS – 2 GB RAM
Small workloads and personal projects.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 1 vCPU
- 2 GB RAM
- 40 GB SSD
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
Linux VPS – 4 GB RAM
Web servers and small databases.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 2 vCPU
- 4 GB RAM
- 80 GB SSD
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
Linux VPS – 8 GB RAM
Production web applications.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 4 vCPU
- 8 GB RAM
- 160 GB SSD
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
Linux VPS – 16 GB RAM
High-traffic applications.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 8 vCPU
- 16 GB RAM
- 320 GB SSD
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
Linux VPS – 32 GB RAM
Enterprise applications.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 16 vCPU
- 32 GB RAM
- 640 GB SSD
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
Linux VPS – 64 GB RAM
Massive workloads and consolidation.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 32 vCPU
- 64 GB RAM
- 1280 GB SSD
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
Prices exclude VAT. Local currency figures are indicative and settled at checkout. Need more cores or memory? Talk to Sales.
Network
Your users are on Safaricom, Faiba and Zuku
Kenyan fixed broadband is concentrated in a handful of networks a Nairobi buyer already knows by name. In the Communications Authority of Kenya's figures for January–March 2026, Safaricom held 941,501 fixed subscriptions, Jamii Telecommunications — Faiba — 517,270, Wananchi's Zuku 276,607 and Poa Internet 256,517, out of 2,656,653 in total. On mobile, the Authority counts 84,090,298 active SIMs and 52,852,505 mobile broadband subscriptions.
Whichever of those your visitors arrive on, they are inside Kenya — and so is ke-1a. A request from a Safaricom handset in Westlands is exchanged at KIXP, lands on your instance and comes back, and the entire round trip happens between two points in the same city. No ocean in the middle of it, and no European data centre deciding how quickly your checkout responds.
2.65M
Fixed subscriptions in Kenya (CA, Q1 2026)
84.1M
Active SIMs (CA, Q1 2026)
136
Networks peering at KIXP, Nairobi (PeeringDB)
480 km
Mombasa landing to Nairobi backhaul
Nairobi peering — KIXP
The Kenya Internet Exchange Point is operated by TESPOK and has run in its current form since February 2002. PeeringDB records 136 peer networks, 151 connections and 2.9 Tbps of combined capacity across four Nairobi facilities. Lineserve peers at KIXP, so traffic between ke-1a and another network present there is exchanged inside Nairobi instead of being hauled to Europe and back.
The Mombasa hop nobody mentions
Every Kenyan international subsea cable lands at Mombasa — TEAMS, SEACOM, EASSy, LION2, DARE1 and PEACE — and the traffic is backhauled roughly 480 km inland to Nairobi. The Authority reports 28,130 Gbps of lit international capacity, of which 17,759 Gbps is in use. Hosting in Nairobi is a statement about domestic traffic: anything leaving Kenya still goes to the coast first.
Payments
Pay the way Kenya pays
Mobile money is not an alternative payment method in Kenya. It is the default, and the card is the alternative. The Communications Authority counts 53,368,939 active mobile money subscriptions served by 602,470 registered agents, with M-Pesa holding 89.1% of the market. A Kenyan business that has never owned a dollar-denominated card has still paid for everything it uses this month. So the checkout here is built the other way round from an international one — and you are billed in KES, so nothing converts, nothing lands on your statement as a foreign transaction, and your bank adds no foreign-transaction fee.
M-Pesa first
M-Pesa and other mobile money, in shillings. You are billed in KES, so nothing converts, no international transaction appears on your statement and your bank adds no foreign-transaction fee. Kenyan VAT at 16% is added at checkout.
Bank transfer second
The rail for larger invoices. An annual commitment or a dedicated server can exceed a mobile-money transaction limit, and a transfer handles what a push cannot.
Card third
Visa and Mastercard work if your finance team prefers them, and for some finance teams they are the right answer. They are just not the assumption here.
Pick your OS
Same servers, your operating system
Every plan runs on the same NVMe-backed platform — choose the operating system that fits your stack, or dig into the dedicated page for each.
Linux VPS
Full root and SSH from first boot, with free images kept current — for web servers, containers, databases, and everything open source.
- Ubuntu, Debian, Rocky, AlmaLinux & Fedora
- Cloud-init ready on deploy
- Images free on every plan
Windows VPS
A licensed, activated Windows Server with full administrator rights over RDP — for .NET applications, SQL Server, and trading platforms.
- Windows Server 2022 license included
- Full admin rights over RDP
- Sized for SQL Server workloads
Trading forex? There's a dedicated Forex VPS page for MT4, MT5 & trading bots.
What's included
Everything on every plan
No feature tiers, no upsell traps. Every VPS ships with the full stack — you only choose the operating system and how much compute you need.
NVMe SSD storage
Enterprise NVMe drives for fast boot, quick builds, and low-latency databases.
Live in 60 seconds
Your server provisions and comes online in under a minute, Linux or Windows.
Full root or admin
Complete root access with SSH on Linux, full administrator rights over RDP on Windows.
Dedicated IPv4 & free IPv6
One dedicated public IPv4 plus a free /64 IPv6 block on every plan.
1 Gbps networking
Fast ports with unlimited local traffic — serve your region without metering anxiety.
Free DDoS protection
Always-on network-layer mitigation included on every plan at no extra cost.
Snapshots & backups
Capture point-in-time snapshots and schedule automated backups in a click.
Private networking
Isolated internal networks to connect your instances securely, region by region.
API & CLI
Automate everything through a clean API and command-line tool. Infrastructure as code, natively.
Tax & invoicing
What Kenyan VAT means for your hosting invoice
This is the part an overseas provider cannot help you with. Kenya's standard VAT rate is 16%, and the Kenya Revenue Authority treats digital marketplace supplies as taxable under section 5(2)(b) of the VAT Act. KRA's published list of taxable digital services names cloud backup, email hosting and software subscriptions — hosting sits squarely inside it. VAT is due by the 20th of the month following the earlier of invoice, performance or payment, filed on a VAT3 return through iTax.
For a Kenyan business the practical question is narrower than any of that: can I claim this? Input VAT and the expense are only safe on audit against a valid tax invoice carrying your own KRA PIN.
What a Kenyan tax invoice carries
The seller's KRA PIN and registered name; a unique invoice number; the buyer's KRA PIN on B2B sales; the item description and taxable value; the VAT charged; and the KRA control number and QR code returned when the invoice is transmitted.
Lineserve Limited is registered for VAT in Kenya, so your invoice is a Kenyan tax invoice with the 16% shown on it — not a foreign receipt your accountant has to argue about. Talk to [email protected] about your invoicing requirements before you order.
Data residency
Where your data sits, under Kenyan law
Kenya's Data Protection Act, No. 24 of 2019, is administered by the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner. Two things about it are worth knowing before you choose where to host.
Hosting abroad does not take you outside the Act
Section 4(b) applies the Act to a controller or processor who is not established or ordinarily resident in Kenya, but processing personal data of data subjects located in Kenya. Moving the server to Frankfurt moves the data; it does not move the obligation.
Sending data out of Kenya is conditional, not forbidden
Section 48 permits cross-border transfer where appropriate safeguards have been demonstrated to the Data Commissioner, or where the transfer is necessary for contract performance or another listed ground. Section 49(1) is stricter for sensitive personal data, requiring the data subject's consent and confirmation of appropriate safeguards. Keep that data in ke-1a and neither section has anything to bite on: there is no transfer to justify, no safeguards to demonstrate to the Data Commissioner, no consent to gather before a record can leave the country. It never leaves.
Regulation 26 is narrower than most pages imply
Section 50 lets the Cabinet Secretary require certain processing to run through a server or data centre located in Kenya, and Regulation 26 of the Data Protection (General) Regulations, 2021 exercises that power for six named purposes: civil registration and legal identity; the conduct of elections; overseeing systems for administering public finances; running a protected computer system under the Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act, 2018; early childhood and basic education; and primary or secondary health care. If your system is not one of those — and most Kenyan businesses are not — any page telling you Kenyan law requires all your data to stay in Kenya is wrong.
What Lineserve provides here 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. Registration and compliance remain yours as the data controller.
Who runs here
What Kenyan teams actually run in Nairobi
Digital lenders and fintechs
M-Pesa integration endpoints that must receive Safaricom callbacks reliably, credit-scoring batch jobs over alternative data, KYC document stores, loan-book databases, USSD gateway backends, and webhook receivers that cannot afford a cold start. The callbacks originate in Kenya; so should the endpoint.
SACCOs and microfinance
Core banking systems, member portals, USSD and mobile channels, month-end and dividend batch runs, and Paybill reconciliation jobs. Steady, sizeable, long-lived workloads — a large VPS or a dedicated server, not a hobby instance.
Online retail
WooCommerce and Magento stores where checkout latency is felt by the customer at the moment of payment, M-Pesa callback endpoints, inventory sync, and product images served from S3-compatible storage in the same region as the store.
Media and publishing
Nairobi's news sector has a traffic pattern most markets do not: election cycles, budget day in June, and exam-results days are hard, predictable, single-day spikes on top of a normal load. WordPress behind a cache on a resizable VPS handles that better than a fixed box.
ISPs, WISPs and MSPs
RADIUS and AAA, Splynx-type billing and provisioning, recursive DNS resolvers, NetFlow collectors, Zabbix and LibreNMS, speedtest and looking-glass nodes. These workloads are useless outside the country they serve.
Agencies and the .ke long tail
One buyer, many client sites: multi-tenant VPS hosting, staging environments, CyberPanel or Plesk installs, and Git-based deploys. The agency channel is where most Kenyan domains end up pointed.
NGOs and donor programmes
DHIS2 health deployments, KoboToolbox and ODK survey servers, monitoring-and-evaluation dashboards, and county revenue systems. This is also where Regulation 26 bites hardest, because basic education and primary and secondary health care are named categories.
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
Migrating
Moving from where you are now
From an overseas provider
The technical part is the easy part — an rsync, a database dump, a DNS change. What actually changes is commercial. Today you pay a dollar price on a card, absorbing the spread and your bank's foreign-transaction fee, and receive a receipt from a company with no Kenyan tax identity. Afterwards you pay a shilling price you can budget against, from a rail you already use, with support in your own working hours and a Kenyan number to call. Your server moves from a European rack to a Nairobi one — a straightforward improvement for Kenyan users and a straightforward non-improvement for European ones.
From another Kenyan host
Nairobi hosting, a Kenyan IP and M-Pesa billing are table stakes in this market — every local provider advertises them, and they are right to. So the reason to move is not any of those. It is what sits underneath: IaaS primitives rather than resold cPanel, so you get an API, a CLI, snapshots, private networking and the ability to resize a running machine; a published 99.9% uptime SLA; S3-compatible object storage and dedicated servers in the same account; and two further regions in Dar es Salaam and Lagos when you need a copy of something outside Nairobi.
Four questions are worth putting to any host, this one included. Where is the machine physically — which city, and can they name it? What does the uptime SLA actually pay out when it is missed, and who has to claim it? Is domestic traffic exchanged inside Kenya, or does it take a trip abroad and back? And does the invoice carry a KRA PIN your accountant can file against input VAT? Choose on the answers.
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]FAQ
Questions, answered
Every plan — Linux or Windows — ships with NVMe SSD storage, 1 Gbps networking with unlimited local traffic, one dedicated public IPv4 address, and a free /64 IPv6 block. No feature tiers: you only choose how much compute you need.
Pick Linux for web servers, containers, databases, and anything built on open-source tooling — images are free and you get full root with SSH. Pick Windows for .NET applications, RDP desktops, SQL Server, and trading platforms — every Windows plan includes a licensed, activated Windows Server.
Yes. Windows plans include a fully licensed, activated Windows Server 2022 Standard, provided under a Services Provider License Agreement. There's nothing to bring or key in — the price you see is the full price.
Yes. Linux plans give you full root access with SSH key authentication; Windows plans give you full administrator rights over RDP. It's your server to configure however you like.
They're the same platform. VPS plans are ready-sized bundles at a fixed monthly price; the Cloud Server page lets you build a custom machine priced per vCPU, GB, and SSD. Pick whichever entry point suits you.
Yes. Resize to a larger plan as your workload grows, with minimal downtime — and you can move up the range from the smallest plan to 32 vCPUs and 64 GB of RAM without migrating providers.
Under 60 seconds for both operating systems. Linux servers run any cloud-init user data you provide; Windows servers come activated and ready for RDP.
In ke-1a, our Nairobi region. Your instance is created there and stays there unless you move it.
Faster than the same site hosted in Europe, because the request never leaves the country. Their browser resolves your name, the request is exchanged at KIXP in Nairobi, and your VPS answers from the same city. The 480 km haul to the Mombasa landings, and the subsea cable beyond it, stay out of the round trip altogether.
No — compliance belongs to you as the data controller, whichever country the server is in. What Nairobi gives you is residency: your personal data stays in Kenya, so the cross-border transfer conditions in sections 48 and 49 do not arise for it, and the shortest answer to "where is our customer data?" is the name of a city your regulator can reach.
Regulation 26 requires processing through a server and data centre located in Kenya, or at least one serving copy of the data in a Kenyan data centre, for six named purposes — civil registration and identity, elections, public finance administration, protected computer systems, basic education, and primary or secondary health care. ke-1a is in Nairobi. Confirm the specifics against your own obligations with your counsel.
Yes. M-Pesa is a supported payment method for Kenyan customers, alongside bank transfer and card, and you are billed in KES throughout.
KES. Prices can be viewed in USD, KES, TZS or NGN, but as a Kenyan customer you pay in shillings with no forex conversion — and no foreign-transaction fee from your bank.
Yes. Your data is hosted in Kenya and stays in-country, giving you data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act. It is not moved out of Kenya without your instruction.
Kenya has a local line on +254 119 039 063, alongside [email protected]. Kenya is on East Africa Time year-round, with no daylight saving, so business hours mean one thing all year.
Deploy your VPS in under 60 seconds
Linux or Windows, running close to your users. Pay in local currency, with no card required to start.
No credit card required · 99.9% uptime SLA · Billed in KES