Debian VPS — hosted in Dar es Salaam
Debian VPS Hosting in Tanzania
For the box that still has to be running in 2031.
Some servers are projects and some are commitments. A form server collecting field submissions across a four-year programme, the mail relay, the machine three staff handovers have already passed through — those are bought once and expected to behave. Debian is the distribution that behaves. Run it in tz-1a, in Dar es Salaam, on a shilling price you can write into a budget that has to survive as long as the server does.
- Debian stable in tz-1a, our Dar es Salaam region
- Conservative updates — the box you configure once
- Priced in TZS, with annual billing at ten months for twelve
- Data residency for Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act — your data stays in-country
- Full root, SSH keys and a dedicated IPv4 on every plan
No credit card required · Billed in TZS
Pricing
Simple plans, billed in your currency
Pay in local currency — no cards, no forex surprises. Every plan is full root, full network, no throttling. 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.
Weighing up Windows too? Compare all Linux & Windows plans on the VPS Hosting page.
Why Debian
Why Debian on Lineserve
Debian stable is the benchmark for servers that just keep running — a lean base, conservative updates, and the apt ecosystem, on NVMe hardware in your region.
- The image is free on every plan — you only pay for the server.
- Famously stable releases with conservative, well-tested updates.
- Minimal footprint — more of your RAM goes to your workload.
- Cloud-init runs your setup on first boot — packages, users, and keys, done.
Debian images
Updated regularly
Use cases
What people run on Debian
Long-lived production boxes
Servers you set up once and expect to run for years — Debian's home turf.
Web & mail servers
Nginx, Apache, Postfix and Dovecot, all a clean apt install away.
Docker & containers
A lean, stable host under your containers — nothing running that you didn't put there.
PostgreSQL & MySQL
NVMe-backed databases on a base OS that doesn't surprise you mid-quarter.
Self-hosted apps
Nextcloud, Gitea, Vaultwarden — the self-hosting community's default distro.
DNS, proxies & edge
HAProxy, Unbound or WireGuard on a dedicated IPv4 with a free /64 IPv6 block.
Budgets & invoicing
A line item that survives the funding cycle
A grant budget is written once and defended for years, which makes a hosting line in a foreign currency a small unforced error. The figure you put in the proposal is not the figure that clears the account, and the difference is nobody's to absorb. The Tanzanian price list is set in shillings from the start — the 2 GB plan at TZS 43,900 a month, the 4 GB plan at TZS 84,800, the 8 GB plan at TZS 166,600 — so the number in the budget line is the number on the invoice.
Annual billing runs ten months for twelve, which fixes the cost for a full budget year and takes a fifth off it. For a programme paying by bank transfer against a purchase order, that is one movement a year and one document to file rather than twelve. Displayed prices exclude VAT; mainland VAT is 18% on digital and electronic services and is added at checkout.
Talk to [email protected] before you order about annual terms, purchase orders, or a single account covering several programme instances.
Who runs here
The Tanzanian workloads that outlive their own staff
Debian's Tanzanian buyer is rarely chasing a feature. They are protecting a system that has to keep working through a handover, a budget year and a change of coordinator.
Field data collection for donor programmes
An ODK Central or KoboToolbox server taking submissions from enumerators in Mbeya, Mwanza and Kigoma, sometimes weeks after the interview when a phone finally finds signal. The programme runs four years; the server has to run four years, on a base that will not decide to move a config file underneath it. Beneficiary responses are personal data, and on this instance they are personal data held in Tanzania.
Health and M&E platforms
DHIS2, an indicator dashboard, the reporting instance a donor logs into once a quarter. These are handed over — from the consultant who built it to the M&E officer who inherits it, and from that officer to the next one. Documentation written against Debian stable in year one is still accurate in year four, which is worth more to this buyer than any newer package.
File sync for teams who are offline half the week
Nextcloud or a plain sync target for staff who spend Monday to Thursday in districts with thin connectivity and Friday reconciling everything in Dar es Salaam. The server holds the canonical copy, in-country, and the laptops catch up when they can. Nothing in that pattern wants a distribution that ships a new major release every six months.
The infrastructure box nobody touches
Authoritative DNS, a mail relay, a VPN endpoint, the backup target, the monitoring host that watches everything else. Set up in one afternoon, logged into twice a year, and it has to survive both. Debian's minimal base puts more of a small plan's RAM into the job and less into things you did not install.
Cooperative and agri-export systems on a harvest calendar
Membership registers, payout runs, warehouse receipts and buyer portals for coffee, cashew, clove and tobacco cooperatives — agriculture employs over 60% of Tanzanians and its software has two busy months and ten quiet ones. The right machine idles reliably for most of the year, takes a resize before the season, and asks for nothing in between.
Regions
tz-1a is home. Nairobi and Lagos are on the same account.
Deploy in Dar es Salaam and your data stays in Tanzania, in the same city as most of the people using it. ke-1a in Nairobi and ng-1a in Lagos are one API call away on the same console and the same shilling bill, so a standby or an offsite copy is a line in a config file rather than a supplier to onboard. Typical in-metro round trips are around 6 ms in Dar es Salaam, ~2 ms in Nairobi and ~4 ms in Lagos.
Traffic between Tanzanian networks is exchanged in Dar es Salaam. The Tanzania Internet eXchange has run there since 2003 as a project of TISPA, the Tanzanian ISP association; PeeringDB records 32 networks and 798G of connected capacity there, with Akamai, Meta, Cloudflare and TTCL among them, and no fee to join. The point of a local exchange is a plain one: a packet from one Tanzanian network to another changes hands in the city, instead of being hauled to Europe and back to travel four kilometres.
International capacity comes ashore in the same city: SEACOM, EASSy and SEAS land at Dar es Salaam, a named landing point on 2Africa as well. Inland, the National ICT Broadband Backbone carries it onward — government fibre managed by TTCL, 13,820 km laid of a 16,280 km target as of FY2024/25, reaching every region and crossing into Zambia, Malawi, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. One origin in Dar es Salaam therefore has a real answer for a user in Mwanza, a site office outside Geita and a clearing agent at Tunduma.
TCRA's count for the quarter ending March 2026 tells you who is at the other end: Vodacom 36.19 million subscriptions, Yas 31.85 million, Airtel Tanzania 23.75 million, Halotel 18.32 million, against 58.9 million internet subscriptions nationally, roughly 99% of them mobile wireless. The largest reaches under a third of the country: no carrier arrangement covers a Tanzanian audience, and being inside Tanzania covers all of them at once.
Tanzania
Dar es Salaam
~6 ms
typical, within metro · Data stays in Tanzania
Kenya
Nairobi
~2 ms
typical, within metro · Data stays in Kenya
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%
- When hardware fails
- When the region is the risk
- Service credits applied automatically when we miss the SLA
Support
A Tanzanian line, and a clock that already matches yours
Call +255 761 847 121. Tanzania is on East Africa Time all year with no daylight saving, so there is no drift to track and no arithmetic before you dial — business hours mean the same thing in March as in November. A ticket opened at the start of a Dar es Salaam morning lands inside a working day, rather than at the bottom of a queue that wakes up as yours is ending.
That match is worth the most at the moment you can least afford it. Month-end, last Friday, 16:40: the reconciliation job has stalled, the settlement file has not written, and the deadline is Monday. What you want then is an engineer who is awake and at work with your instance ID in front of them — a resize that needs a reboot window, a snapshot restored into a new instance, a routing question, a port that has stopped answering. Not a form, and not a five-hour wait for somebody's morning.
[email protected] takes the commercial half, and it is worth using before you order: your TIN and registered name as the TRA holds them, a purchase-order or grant code the invoice must carry, an annual invoice that fits the budget year. Migration planning and assistance come at no extra charge, from a rack in Frankfurt or from across town. Customer references are available under NDA.
Tanzania
+255 761 847 121Sales
[email protected]FAQ
Questions, answered
Debian 12 (Bookworm), the current stable release, and Debian 11 (Bullseye) are both available at deploy time. You can also bring your own image with a custom ISO.
Yes. All Linux images, Debian included, are free on every plan — the plan price is the full price of the server.
Both use apt and feel familiar. Debian favours stability and a minimal base, which suits long-lived servers; Ubuntu LTS ships newer packages and more tooling out of the box. If you're unsure, either will serve you well — and you can rebuild to the other any time.
Yes. Every Debian VPS gives you complete root access and SSH key authentication from the moment it boots. It's your server to configure however you like.
Yes. Provide cloud-init user data at deploy and your server bootstraps itself on first boot — packages installed, users created, keys in place before you ever log in.
Yes. Debian's in-place release upgrade via apt is well documented and reliable — or deploy a fresh 12 server and migrate. Either way, snapshot first so you can roll back in a click.
Every plan supports on-demand snapshots and scheduled automated backups. Snapshot storage is billed per GB beyond your included allowance.
Debian, when the server has to outlast the person who built it. Fewer moving parts, conservative updates, and documentation that stays true across a handover. Ubuntu LTS is the better answer when a developer is actively building on the box and wants newer packages. Both use apt, so the skills transfer either way.
It removes it. Under the Personal Data Protection Act, moving personal data out of Tanzania requires a permit applied for in advance from the Commission, naming the recipient, the data, the purpose and the destination. Data that stays on an instance in Dar es Salaam is not transferred anywhere, so no permit arises for it. Your own registration as a controller or processor is a separate obligation and stays yours.
The TZS figures come from our own per-currency price list and are set in shillings, so they do not move with an exchange rate between the quotation and the debit. Annual billing fixes the amount for a full year at ten months for twelve. Talk to sales before you order if a multi-year commitment would help the budget hold.
Yes, and it is the usual choice once a finance officer is involved. Bank transfer, M-Pesa and card are the three methods for Tanzanian customers, all charged in TZS. A transfer gives accounts payable a document to match against the purchase order.
You do — it is your root and your maintenance window. Debian's security updates are conservative enough that most teams run them unattended and check in monthly. Take a snapshot before anything larger, so a bad afternoon is a rollback rather than a rebuild.
Yes, and it is worth doing. Separate instances keep one funder's data and one funder's downtime separate from another's, and each can be sized and closed out with its own programme. They sit on one account and one shilling invoice.
Yes — +255 761 847 121, alongside [email protected] and the ticket queue in your console. Tanzania is on East Africa Time, UTC+3, all year with no daylight saving, so a maintenance window agreed in June means the same thing in December.
Yes. Your data is hosted in Tanzania and stays in-country, giving you data residency for Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act. It isn't moved out of Tanzania without your instruction.
In our Dar es Salaam data centre (tz-1a). Your content is stored and served from Dar es Salaam, 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 TZS. Prices can be viewed in USD, KES, TZS, or NGN, but as a Tanzania customer you pay in TZS with no forex conversion.
Deploy your Debian 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 TZS
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