Windows Server 2019 — the version your software was certified on
Windows Server 2019 VPS Hosting in Kenya
Sometimes the right version is simply the one the vendor tested.
A great deal of Kenyan business software was bought between 2016 and 2020 and has not been re-certified since. The installer expects Server 2019, the support desk asks which version you are on before it asks anything else, and moving it forward is a project nobody has budgeted for this year. Server 2019 in ke-1a carries the lowest Windows licence rate we charge, licensed and activated before you first connect.
- Windows Server 2019 Standard, licensed and activated at first boot
- KES 200 per vCPU per month on a four-core minimum
- Microsoft extended support to January 2029
- RDP and full administrator rights, on a Nairobi instance
- Billed in KES by M-Pesa, bank transfer or card
No credit card required · Billed in KES
Pricing
Simple plans, billed in your currency
Windows licensing included on every plan. Pay in local currency — no cards, no forex surprises. Annual billing gets you two months free.
Windows VPS – 2 GB RAM
Windows Server for web applications.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 1 vCPU
- 2 GB RAM
- 40 GB NVMe
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
- Windows Server 2019 license included
Windows VPS – 4 GB RAM
Windows Server for production apps.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 2 vCPU
- 4 GB RAM
- 80 GB NVMe
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
- Windows Server 2019 license included
Windows VPS – 8 GB RAM
Windows Server for high-traffic apps.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 4 vCPU
- 8 GB RAM
- 160 GB NVMe
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
- Windows Server 2019 license included
Windows VPS – 16 GB RAM
Windows Server for enterprise apps.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 8 vCPU
- 16 GB RAM
- 320 GB NVMe
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
- Windows Server 2019 license included
Windows VPS – 32 GB RAM
Windows Server for large-scale apps.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 16 vCPU
- 32 GB RAM
- 640 GB NVMe
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
- Windows Server 2019 license included
Windows VPS – 64 GB RAM
Windows Server at maximum scale.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 32 vCPU
- 64 GB RAM
- 1280 GB NVMe
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
- Windows Server 2019 license included
Prices exclude VAT. Local currency figures are indicative and settled at checkout. Need a custom configuration? Talk to Sales.
Weighing up Linux too? Compare all Linux & Windows plans on the VPS Hosting page.
Why Windows Server 2019
Why Windows Server 2019
Sometimes the right version is the one your software was certified against. Server 2019 is the mature choice for long-serving line-of-business stacks — at the lowest license price we offer.
- Our most affordable Windows Server license — every plan is $2–$16/mo less than 2022.
- Maximum compatibility with older .NET Framework and vendor apps.
- Licensed and activated under SPLA — nothing to bring or key in.
- Microsoft extended support runs to January 2029.
Windows Server 2019 images
Updated regularly
Use cases
What people run on Windows Server 2019
Legacy .NET Framework apps
Applications built and certified on the 2016/2019 era run exactly as expected.
Line-of-business & ERP
Vendor software that specifies Server 2019 in its support matrix.
Older SQL Server versions
Host SQL Server releases that pair naturally with the 2019 platform.
IIS web applications
Classic ASP.NET and IIS sites on the platform they were deployed for.
File & application servers
Dependable SMB shares and app servers for a team or branch office.
Compatibility testing
Verify your software still behaves on the version your customers run.
What it costs
The oldest licence, and what the saving is for
The licence is charged per vCPU on a four-core minimum, so the version you pick moves the bill by a knowable amount. At KES 200 per vCPU, Server 2019 is KES 800 a month on the smaller plans against KES 1,000 for 2022 and KES 1,200 for 2025. In plan terms that is the 2 GB Windows plan at KES 2,995 rather than KES 3,195 or KES 3,395, and a four-vCPU 8 GB Windows plan at KES 9,130 rather than KES 9,330 or KES 9,530.
Two hundred shillings a month is not why anyone should choose an older platform. The reason to be on this page is the software: an application whose vendor certified 2019 and has not certified anything since. The saving is what quietly funds the migration you will run before January 2029.
Prices exclude VAT and 16% is added at checkout. The invoice comes in shillings from Lineserve Limited, which is registered for VAT in Kenya.
January 2029 is inside most five-year plans. Choose 2019 for the software you have, and put the move to a newer version in a budget line rather than in a corner.
Who runs here
Where Server 2019 still earns its place in Kenya
Accounting and payroll packages bought a decade ago
The Kenyan finance office runs on desktop software with a version number the vendor pinned years ago — sometimes to a .NET Framework build, sometimes to an installer that simply refuses anything newer. Hosting it on the platform it was certified against keeps the vendor's support desk on your side of the argument.
Older SQL Server releases
Database versions that pair naturally with the 2019 platform and are past the point where anyone will re-certify them. Plans here are sized for that work on NVMe storage; SQL Server licensing itself is separate from the Windows licence in the plan price.
Classic ASP.NET and IIS sites
The client sites a Kenyan agency or ISV built between 2015 and 2019 and still maintains. They do not need a newer platform, they need one that keeps receiving security updates and does not change what the application sees underneath it.
School, clinic and county packages from a local ISV
A sizeable share of Kenyan institutional software comes from small local software houses who certified against 2019 and have not retested since. This is often the buyer with no server room at all, moving off a tower in an office to an instance in Nairobi without changing a single thing about the application.
The compatibility instance
If you sell software into the Kenyan market, one 2019 box reproduces what a good number of your customers are still running. It is cheaper than arguing with a bug report you cannot recreate.
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
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
Yes. Every plan on this page includes a licensed, activated Windows Server 2019 Standard under our SPLA — the price you see is the full price, and it's the lowest Windows license price we offer.
Compatibility and cost. If your application vendor certifies against Server 2019 — common for older .NET Framework and line-of-business software — it's the safest home, and each plan costs less than the same plan on a newer version.
Microsoft's extended support for Windows Server 2019 runs to January 2029, with security updates until then. For brand-new deployments with a longer horizon, consider our Server 2022 or 2025 plans.
Yes. Connect over RDP with full administrator rights from the first boot. It's your server to configure however you like.
Yes. Plans are sized for SQL Server workloads with fast NVMe storage and generous RAM. SQL Server licensing is handled separately from the base Windows license — talk to sales for a sized quote.
Yes. Resize to a larger plan as your workload grows, with minimal downtime. You can also move to Server 2022 or 2025 on a fresh instance whenever you're ready.
Every plan supports on-demand snapshots and scheduled automated backups. Snapshot storage is billed per GB beyond your included allowance.
KES 200 per vCPU per month, charged on a minimum of four cores — so KES 800 a month on the one and two-vCPU plans, and KES 1,600 on an eight-vCPU plan. The compute underneath is identical to every other Windows version we offer; the version is a licence decision and you can see its size before you make it.
For a three-year horizon, yes, and Microsoft ships security updates until then. If you are standing up something new that should still be running in the 2030s, our Server 2022 and 2025 pages are the honest destinations for it.
If the software is old enough that the matrix stops there, 2019 is the safe reading of that sentence and the cheapest licence in the range. If the vendor is still shipping releases, ask what they certify today — that answer is usually 2022, and building on it saves you this conversation again in three years.
Yes. The licence rides with the plan, not with you — deploy a fresh instance on the newer version, install the application, bring the data across, and stop paying for the old one. There is nothing to key in, transfer or renew at either end.
Yes, and it is a common shape here: the vendor's Windows application server on 2019, the database or the public web tier on Linux, both instances in ke-1a and both priced in KES on the same account. A Linux image is free, so you are paying for compute rather than for a second licence.
No. The plan price covers Windows Server 2019 Standard, provided under a Services Provider License Agreement and billed per active instance. SQL Server is licensed separately — ask [email protected] or +254 119 039 063 for a sized quote in KES rather than working it out from a table.
The application keeps running and the security updates stop, which is the part that matters. Plan a fresh instance on a newer version well before then, test the application against it, and cut over on a weekend of your choosing rather than one chosen for you.
Yes. Your data is hosted in Kenya and stays in-country, giving you data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act. It isn't moved out of Kenya without your instruction.
In our Nairobi data centre (ke-1a). Your content is stored and served from Nairobi, close to your users.
Pay in your local currency using M-Pesa and other mobile money, bank transfer, or card. No foreign card or forex conversion is required.
You're billed in KES. Prices can be viewed in USD, KES, TZS, or NGN, but as a Kenya customer you pay in KES with no forex conversion.
Deploy your Windows Server 2019 VPS in under 60 seconds
Full root, 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
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Every plan below runs in the same three regions, on the same network, billed the same way.