File Storage — hosted in Dar es Salaam
A shared file system in Dar es Salaam
One directory, mounted by every server that needs it.
Ask a Tanzanian programme office where its documents are and the honest answer is usually a list: a folder on the application server, a copy on somebody's laptop, an external drive in the cabinet, and a sync tool that stopped working in April. Managed NFS replaces that with one directory that every instance mounts at the same path and sees the same way, with no file server to patch and no capacity to provision. It is coming to tz-1a in Dar es Salaam, priced in shillings and held in Tanzania. Tell us what would mount it and we will tell you when it is ready.
- File systems in tz-1a, our Dar es Salaam 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 Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act — your data stays in-country
- Launching soon — priced and billed in TZS
Launching soon · Billed in TZS
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. | TZS 420 | 100 MB/s, burst to 1 GB/s | ~2 ms |
| FastAnalytics, ML training data, media pipelines. | TZS 720 | 500 MB/s, up to 10 GB/s provisioned | <1 ms |
| BasicInfrequently accessed files, archives, backups. | TZS 48 | 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 Dar es Salaam decides this
A bucket is fetched. A file system is mounted.
The difference decides where the thing has to live. An object store is reached over HTTP, one request at a time, by a client that knows it is speaking to a network service — so distance costs a response, and a cache in front hides most of that. A mount is not like that. Your application opens a path and the kernel makes the call for it: 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 and takes the request with it.
So the file system belongs beside the instances that mount it, on the region's private network, and those instances belong in Dar es Salaam because that is where the rest of the system already is. International capacity comes ashore in the same city, inland the National ICT Broadband Backbone reaches every region on government fibre, and traffic between Tanzanian networks is exchanged at TIX in Dar es Salaam. Everything the system needs already arrives in the city the file system would be in.
One honest piece of engineering advice, because it saves a bad week. A mount is for the fleet, not for the field. Servers in tz-1a mounting a file system in tz-1a is a short private path; a laptop in Mwanza mounting the same file system over a congested upcountry link is a different proposition, and it will feel like one. The shape that works is the fleet on the mount and the field on a sync client or an upload form that talks to the applications — which is how most programme deployments are built anyway, once somebody has tried it the other way.
NFSv4.1
Protocol, with full POSIX file locking and permissions
13,820 km
National backbone fibre laid, of a 16,280 km target
1 PB
Ceiling the file system scales to, with nothing to provision
TZS
Quoted, invoiced and settled — nothing converts
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, field submissions and anything served to a browser, and it is live in tz-1a today. File storage is the middle case: shared directories, POSIX paths and file locks, for the applications that were written before object storage existed and are not going to be rewritten this year.
An office in Dar es Salaam can mount it
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 records office, a survey team or a design desk with a working set on a NAS in the corner, that is how a move starts — both sides mounted, nothing cut over, and the Dar es Salaam copy replicated across zones instead of living on one disk that depends on the office being open and powered.
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
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
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%
- 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]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, in a currency the invoice is meant to be in
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 on a shared drive the elastic shape is the fairer one: nobody can forecast what a directory forty people write to will hold at the end of a grant cycle.
Tanzania prices in shillings for a reason that goes past preference. The Finance Act 2024 amended the Bank of Tanzania Act, and the implementing regulations — Government Notice 198 of 2025 — took effect on 28 March 2025: goods and services within Tanzania are priced, quoted, advertised and paid in Tanzanian Shillings, with named exemptions. Indicative launch pricing puts Universal at TZS 420 per GB a month, Fast at TZS 720 and Basic at TZS 48. The gap between the first and the last is where the design decision lives: every real shared drive is mostly cold, and 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 nothing in the applications aware that it happened.
Then the tax mechanics, which are where an overseas supplier stops being useful. Mainland VAT is 18%, administered by the Tanzania Revenue Authority and applying to digital and electronic services; Zanzibar administers its own through the Zanzibar Revenue Authority. Displayed prices exclude VAT and it is calculated and shown separately at checkout. Tanzania is also unusually exact about what a claimable receipt looks like: mainland suppliers turning over TZS 14 million or more issue through an Electronic Fiscal Device, and under EFD protocol 2.1 every invoice carries a verification code — which is a checklist a VAT-registered buyer should bring to the order rather than to the year end.
Line the invoice up with the grant year
Send [email protected] your TIN, your registered name exactly as the TRA holds it, and any purchase-order reference your system needs, and it is on the invoice from the first billing run. If you are buying against a grant line, ask about annual billing at the same time: ten months for twelve, one approval, one payment, one document for the file.
Set the lifecycle policy in the first week
On a shared drive the cold tail always wins. A tiering policy applied to a hundred gigabytes is a configuration change; the same policy applied to forty terabytes three years later is a project, with a meeting about which programme's folders it may touch.
Withholding, for the finance officer who asks first
A Tanzanian business paying a non-resident for services withholds 15% of the gross consideration unless a double tax agreement reduces it, and since the 2016 amendment that applies irrespective of where the service is performed. There is also a 2% digital service tax on gross payments to non-resident providers inside the electronic-services rules. On a storage line it is a small number that recurs indefinitely, so settle it with your adviser at account opening.
Prices are indicative launch pricing and exclude VAT; mainland VAT of 18% is calculated and shown at checkout. Talk to [email protected] or +255 761 847 121 about invoicing requirements before you order.
Data residency
The permit form asks what categories of personal data you are transferring
Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act, 2022 — Chapter 44 — has been in force since 1 May 2023, and the Personal Data Protection Commission has been fully operational since 3 April 2024. Controllers and processors register before processing, five years at a time; the deadline for entities already trading expired on 30 April 2025. Personal data leaves Tanzania on a permit from the Commission, applied for in advance, supported by adequacy in the destination country or by safeguards evidenced in an international, bilateral or contractual arrangement.
The Regulation 20 application asks for the applicant and the recipient, the data subjects, the categories of personal data, the purpose and duration of the transfer, the destination country and entity, and the security arrangements at the far end. Read the second and third of those against a shared drive. Who are the data subjects? Beneficiaries, drivers, members, patients, staff, and whoever else appears in a photograph somebody attached. What categories of personal data are on it? Nobody knows, because a shared directory is the one store that grows without a decision — a scan here, an export there, a folder called handover that four people have written to.
That is the real problem with a shared drive in another country. It is not that the answer is bad, it is that there is no complete answer to give a regulator who asks in advance and monitors the conditions afterwards. Prior authorisation punishes exactly this kind of store, and the penalties are published: administrative fines to TZS 100,000,000 and criminal exposure beyond it. Numbers like those get the question asked in donor audits and bank onboarding long before the Commission raises it.
Keeping the share in Dar es Salaam removes the question rather than answering it. At launch, a file system created in tz-1a will be held in Tanzania and will not leave without your instruction — data residency for Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act. Registration, notices, lawful basis and breach reporting stay yours as the controller. What Lineserve supplies is the location, and on a store nobody has inventoried the location is the part that does most of the work.
Access points do what a folder convention cannot
Per-application and per-team roots, each with its own permissions, give every consumer its own view of the file system. On a multi-programme or multi-client share that is the difference between an access control model and a naming convention held together by everyone remembering it — and it is what makes a per-programme data protection clause enforceable rather than aspirational.
Replication inside the region, replication out of it
A file system is replicated across availability zones inside tz-1a at no extra cost, which survives the loss of a zone. Cross-region replication to Nairobi or Lagos is a different decision entirely: a copy of Tanzanian personal data in another country, which is a transfer and brings the permit regime with it. Datasets, build artefacts and material carrying no personal data raise no such question.
Tiering changes the price, not the place
Cold files move to the Basic class inside the same file system, in the same region, at the same paths. Somebody in a donor audit will eventually ask whether the archiving policy created a transfer. It did not, and being able to say so in one sentence is worth the five minutes it takes to understand it now.
Who is asking for this
The Tanzanian teams that need one directory in several places
The pattern is a fleet or a set of applications rather than a single server. Several things have to read and write the same files, and they expect a path rather than an API.
Donor programmes and the document store
The heaviest segment in the Tanzanian buyer mix — TANGO alone counts over 485 member organisations, and the large international programmes run country operations from Dar es Salaam. Their files are read from several directions at once: an M&E dashboard, a reporting job, a grant accounting system in ERPNext or Odoo, a caseworker's application, and a finance officer assembling a donor claim. Copying that pile into each system is how it ends up in five places and gets updated in one. One mounted store, per-programme access points, one copy in Tanzania.
Survey and field data, once it is back from the field
KoBoToolbox and ODK submissions arrive with photographs and GPS traces attached, and the field devices sync to the applications rather than to a mount. What happens next is the shared part: cleaning scripts, an analyst's working copy, exports for a quarterly report, and the attachments a health or protection team needs to open individually. That working set is personal data about identifiable Tanzanians, and it is the part of a programme most likely to still exist three grants later.
The port, transit and freight forwarding
Dar es Salaam is the transit gateway for six land-linked countries, and the paperwork is the product: scanned bills of lading, customs declarations and TANCIS submissions, delivery photographs from drivers, and the EDI archive behind it. Several parties reach the same documents — the operations desk, the clearing agents, the claims team, finance — and retention runs long because disputes run long. A shared file system is the version of that pile that does not depend on which laptop was in the office.
Mining, survey and their contractors
Gold exports reached USD 4,968.4 million in 2025, and the buyer is very often the service contractor rather than the mine. Geological and survey datasets, drill logs, drone and site imagery: large files written once from a site on a thin link, then read repeatedly by processing jobs and workstations in Dar es Salaam. Several workers reading one dataset is the case the Fast class exists for, and finished surveys fall to Basic on a lifecycle policy.
ISPs, WISPs and network operators
Configuration backups, firmware images, provisioning templates, boot images and monitoring outputs that several machines and several engineers reach for during the same maintenance window. Small, shared, constantly rewritten, useless outside the country they serve, and currently living in whichever engineer's home directory they were first put in. A mount is what turns that into infrastructure.
Agencies, ISVs and resellers
Dar es Salaam holds 66.5% of Tanzanian startups, clustered on the Ali Hassan Mwinyi Road corridor, and the storage problem is specific: many client sites, each with an uploads directory and a theme tree that has to match across web servers and staging, plus a handover pile at the end of every project. One file system with an access point per client turns adding a second web server into a capacity decision rather than a data migration.
Tourism and hospitality
2,289,867 international arrivals in 2025, with Arusha and Zanzibar as the operational centres. Operators hold large image and video libraries plus itinerary and booking documents, reached by the website, the reservations desk and the channel manager at once. The published photography is served from a bucket; the working library several people edit and re-export is a share, and the guest paperwork on it stays in Tanzania.
Indicative launch pricing in shillings: Universal at TZS 420 per GB a month, Fast at TZS 720 and Basic at TZS 48, 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 Dar es Salaam when this lands
From rsync, sticky sessions and one machine everybody mounts
Most fleets that need this already have a workaround, and the workaround is why somebody is reading the page. Files synchronised between application servers on a cron, with a window in which the two disagree. 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 nothing 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 class of bug that only appears under load and only at the worst time.
From a NAS in the programme office
The more common Tanzanian starting point, and rarely a decision anybody made — it is simply where the files ended up. A NAS in the corner, an external drive beside it, a working set that depends on the building being open, powered and dry, and a backup habit that survives exactly as long as the person who set it up. Mounting the file system alongside it over a VPN makes the move a change of habit rather than a cutover: both sides mounted, the Dar es Salaam copy replicated across zones, and the old share 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, how many machines would mount it and when your grant or budget cycle needs 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 tz-1a, our Dar es Salaam region. A file system lives in one region and is mounted by instances in that region, and it does not leave Tanzania 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 TZS 420 per GB a month for Universal, TZS 720 for Fast and TZS 48 for Basic, billed on the data actually stored and measured hourly, with nothing to provision and no minimum. Prices exclude VAT. These 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 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, field submissions, backups and anything served to a browser. 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 publish; 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.
Build it the other way round. Servers in tz-1a mounting a file system in tz-1a is a short private path; a laptop on a congested link in Mwanza or Mbeya mounting the same file system is a different experience, and a mount is unforgiving about it. Put the fleet on the mount and the field on a sync client or an upload form that talks to your applications.
Yes. A file system created in tz-1a is held in Dar es Salaam and is not moved out of the country without your instruction, which gives you data residency for Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act. Your duties as a controller, registration included, are unchanged.
Not for data that stays in Tanzania — the Commission's permit regime governs transfers out of the country, and that question does not arise for a file system held in Dar es Salaam. Whether any of your other processing needs a permit is between you and the Personal Data Protection Commission.
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 — which is worth knowing before a donor audit asks the question.
Thousands, concurrently, with every mount seeing the same files in real time. Adding an application server stops being a data decision, which is the whole point for anyone running a fleet behind a load balancer.
In TZS, with M-Pesa and other mobile money, bank transfer, or card — the same methods as the rest of your account. Nothing converts, and no bank adds a foreign-transaction fee.
No. Displayed prices exclude VAT. Mainland VAT on digital and electronic services is 18%, administered by the Tanzania Revenue Authority, and it is calculated and shown separately at checkout. Zanzibar is administered separately.
Annual billing runs ten months for twelve on eligible plans — one approval, one payment, one document for the file. Tell [email protected] when your grant or budget year starts and it can be lined up with it rather than cutting across it.
Customer references are available under NDA for the products that are live today, object storage in tz-1a among them. Tell [email protected] what you are building and you will be pointed at the closest match.
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 TZS