Load Balancers — Dar es Salaam, tz-1a · launching soon
Coming soonLoad Balancers in Tanzania
One address in front. A pool of Dar es Salaam servers behind it. Nothing that stops when one of them does.
Tanzania's demanding traffic is rarely a viral moment. It is a subscriber portal an ISP's whole customer base logs into on the first of the month, a donor reporting deadline that lands on every field office at once, a clearing agent at the port who cannot file because a system is down while a truck queue grows on Nyerere Road. A load balancer is the piece that turns one machine into a pool: a backend that stops passing its health check leaves the rotation, traffic goes to the ones that are answering, and the address your users hold never changes. Load Balancers arrive in tz-1a soon, flat monthly and indicatively from TZS 40,000. Join the waitlist and we will tell you when it is ready.
- Launching soon in Dar es Salaam — region tz-1a
- HTTP, HTTPS, TCP and UDP, with SSL termination at the balancer
- Health checks pull a failing backend out of the pool automatically
- Flat monthly pricing in TZS, with no per-request charges
- 99.99% uptime SLA, and unlimited transfer to same-region backends
Launching soon · Billed in TZS
Pricing
One flat price, no per-request fees
Pick a size for your traffic. Data transfer between the load balancer and same-region backends is unlimited and included. In your currency, no forex.
Small
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 10,000 concurrent connections
- 250 Mbps throughput
- Up to 20 backends
- Basic health checks
- Unlimited same-region transfer
Medium
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 50,000 concurrent connections
- 1 Gbps throughput
- Up to 50 backends
- Advanced health checks
- Unlimited same-region transfer
Large
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 100,000 concurrent connections
- 2.5 Gbps throughput
- Up to 100 backends
- Health checks with SSL verification
- Unlimited same-region transfer
Enterprise
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 250,000+ concurrent connections
- 5+ Gbps throughput
- Unlimited backends
- Custom-script health checks
- Unlimited same-region transfer
Flat monthly pricing with no hidden fees and no per-request charges. Upgrade or downgrade tiers anytime with zero downtime. Prices exclude VAT; local currency figures are indicative and settled at checkout.
Network
Four networks, one country, one address in Dar es Salaam
Tanzania has no dominant carrier, and that changes what an entry point has to do. In the quarter ending March 2026 the TCRA counted Vodacom at 36.19 million subscriptions, Yas at 31.85 million, Airtel Tanzania at 23.75 million, Halotel at 18.32 million and TTCL at 1.80 million — 111.9 million in total at 159.8% penetration, with the largest of them holding 32.3%. A surge here does not arrive down one pipe. It arrives from four at once, and the only thing all four have in common is that they are inside Tanzania.
So is the balancer. Traffic between Tanzanian networks is exchanged in Dar es Salaam at TIX, which TISPA has run since 2003 and where PeeringDB lists 32 networks, 33 connections and 798G of connected capacity. International capacity comes ashore in the same city — SEACOM, EASSy and SEAS land at Dar es Salaam, and Dar es Salaam is a named landing point on 2Africa. Upcountry is domestic too: the National ICT Broadband Backbone is 13,820 km of state fibre managed by TTCL reaching every region. A single public address in tz-1a is therefore reachable from Mwanza, Arusha, Dodoma and Mbeya without leaving the country.
Then the client. Roughly 99% of Tanzanian internet connections are mobile wireless, 4G covers 94.2% of the population, and smartphone penetration sits at 42.5%. The person waiting on your login screen is on a mid-range Android on a cell, retrying when it stalls — which is exactly the traffic pattern that turns a struggling backend into a stampede. A health check that removes that backend before the retries pile onto it is worth more here than an extra core.
Behind the address, capacity becomes arithmetic. Add backends before the deadline, take them away after it, with no DNS change and no downtime on the entry point. Transfer between the balancer and same-region backends is unlimited and included, so the probing, the retries and the fan-out across the pool all stay inside Dar es Salaam and inside the flat monthly figure.
111.9M
Telecom subscriptions in Tanzania (TCRA, Q1 2026)
32.3%
Share held by the largest operator (TCRA, Q1 2026)
798G
Capacity connected at TIX, Dar es Salaam (PeeringDB)
13,820 km
National backbone fibre laid (NICTBB, FY2024/25)
Tanzanian peaks have deadlines, not headlines
The surges that hurt here are administrative and seasonal rather than viral. A donor reporting cut-off at the end of a grant quarter, when every country office uploads at once. Month-start billing across an operator's subscriber base. The tourist booking season into Arusha and Zanzibar. Harvest and payout windows for a crop cooperative. All of them are in somebody's calendar months ahead, which makes them the easiest kind of peak to build for and the least excusable kind to be caught by.
When downtime moves something physical
Dar es Salaam is the transit gateway for six land-linked countries, and the Standard Gauge Railway is reshaping inland movement. When a freight-forwarding portal or a customs integration stops answering, the consequence is not a bounced session — it is a truck that does not move, a container that does not clear, and demurrage that somebody pays. This is the segment that buys a load balancer for the second reason rather than the first: not because traffic spikes, but because it cannot stop.
Pricing & payment
What it will cost, in shillings
A balancer is priced the way the rest of the platform is: one flat monthly figure per balancer, in Tanzanian Shillings, with no per-request charge and no metered fee for traffic to same-region backends. The TZS figures below are indicative launch pricing — the shape of the bill rather than an amount payable today — and they come from Tanzania's own price list rather than a dollar rate converted when the page loads.
Four sizes, one flat monthly figure
Small is indicatively TZS 40,000 a month for 10,000 concurrent connections and 250 Mbps across up to 20 backends. Medium is TZS 80,000 for 50,000 connections and 1 Gbps. Large is TZS 130,000 for 100,000 connections and 2.5 Gbps. Enterprise is TZS 260,000 for 250,000-plus connections, 5-plus Gbps and unlimited backends.
M-Pesa, bank transfer or card — all in TZS
At launch a Tanzanian customer settles a balancer the way they settle a VPS today: in shillings, by M-Pesa, bank transfer or card. The figure quoted is the figure invoiced, nothing converts, and no card issuer takes a margin out of the middle of it.
A figure a grant line can hold
Programme budgets are approved once and spent over a year, which makes a flat monthly figure in shillings worth more than a cheap variable one. Annual billing on eligible services runs ten months for twelve — one approval, one payment, one document for the file — and the intention is for balancers to sit on the same invoice as the servers behind them.
The waitlist costs nothing
No card, no commitment. Tell [email protected] what you would put behind a balancer, how many backends, and which week of the year you are most worried about, and that shapes what ships in tz-1a first.
Displayed prices exclude VAT; mainland VAT on this class of service is 18%, administered by the Tanzania Revenue Authority, and it is calculated and shown separately at checkout. Local-currency figures are indicative until launch. Send your TIN and registered name to [email protected] before you order and the invoice carries them from the first billing run.
The platform
Everything between your users and your servers
Termination, health checks, persistence, and protection — handled at the edge of your stack so your backends just serve.
Automatic failover
Failing backends drop out of the pool instantly and traffic reroutes to healthy servers — no manual intervention.
Smart health checks
Probe backends over HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, or ICMP with custom intervals, timeouts, and recovery thresholds.
SSL/TLS termination
TLS 1.2 and 1.3 with SNI for multiple certificates, automatic renewal, and encryption offloaded from your backends.
Four balancing algorithms
Round Robin, Least Connections, Source IP Hash, and Weighted Round Robin — match the algorithm to the workload.
Session persistence
Cookie-based or source-IP sticky sessions keep stateful clients pinned to the same backend.
DDoS protection built in
Rate limiting and connection throttling at the balancer, before traffic ever reaches your servers.
IPv4 & IPv6
Full dual-stack support on every load balancer, at every tier.
Real-time monitoring
Live traffic, connection counts, backend health, and access logs with request-level detail.
API & Terraform
Create and manage balancers from a REST API or the Terraform provider — wired into your CI/CD.
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 what you're building
Web applications
Spread HTTP and HTTPS traffic across your web servers for high volume with zero downtime.
APIs & microservices
A single entry point routing requests across API instances and containerized services.
Database read scaling
Balance read queries across replicas while writes go straight to the primary.
Gaming & streaming
Low-latency TCP and UDP balancing for player connections and high-bandwidth media.
How it works
In front of your traffic in three steps
Create a load balancer
Pick a region and a size tier — live in under 60 seconds from the console or API.
Add backends & health checks
Point it at your servers, choose an algorithm, and set the health check that fits.
Point your DNS at it
One record change and traffic flows through — failover and monitoring are already on.
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 beats maintaining your own proxy
Running NGINX or HAProxy on a VPS means one more machine to patch, monitor, certify, and fail over — and it's usually the single point of failure in front of everything else.
Data residency
The balancer is where the connection actually ends
Terminating TLS at the balancer moves part of your architecture forward. The certificate lives there, the user's connection ends there, and the access log with request-level detail is written there. Create it in tz-1a and all of that is held in Dar es Salaam, alongside the backends behind it.
That matters more in Tanzania than in most places, because taking personal data out of the country needs permission first. The 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. Personal data leaves Tanzania on a permit from the Commission, supported by adequacy in the destination country or by safeguards evidenced in an agreement, and the Regulation 20 application asks for the recipient, the data subjects, the categories of data, the purpose and duration, the destination and the security arrangements there.
Prior authorisation is a different animal from a self-assessment: it finishes when a regulator says so rather than when you do. Keep the entry point and the pool in Dar es Salaam and the request path never raises the question. Data residency for Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act is what the region supplies; the controller obligations stay yours, and they are lighter when the data never left.
An access log is personal data
Request-level logging captures client IP addresses, timestamps and paths for every visitor, and it grows fastest on exactly the days you built for. Held in tz-1a it stays in Dar es Salaam with everything else, which is one fewer dataset to account for in a donor audit or a bank onboarding pack.
The penalties are published
Administrative penalties under the Act run to TZS 100,000,000, and criminal fines reach TZS 5,000,000,000 for corporations. A regime that publishes numbers like those is one whose questions get asked in due diligence long before they are asked by a regulator.
Who it is for
The Tanzanian systems that cannot be one machine
Two things make a business buy a load balancer: traffic that spikes, and traffic that must not stop. In Tanzania the second reason does most of the selling.
ISPs, telcos and subscriber portals
Four mobile networks, a state backbone operator and a set of enterprise ISPs — SimbaNET, Habari Node, Liquid Intelligent Technologies — all run infrastructure their own customers depend on. RADIUS and AAA, recursive resolvers and authoritative zones, self-care and top-up portals, provisioning and billing systems: a mix of TCP, UDP and HTTP where the outage is felt by the operator's subscribers rather than by the operator. These buyers will read a traceroute before they read a page, which is the correct order.
NGOs and donor programmes
The heaviest single segment in the Tanzanian buyer mix — TANGO alone counts over 485 member organisations. DHIS2 and other health and M&E platforms, KoBoToolbox and ODK form servers taking submissions from field teams on mobile data, donor reporting dashboards. The load is deadline-shaped: quiet for weeks, then every country office submitting inside the same 48 hours. A pool that absorbs that and shrinks afterwards fits a grant budget better than a permanently oversized server.
Ports, transit and freight forwarding
Transport management and freight-forwarding systems, customs and TANCIS integration middleware, GPS and telematics ingest from truck fleets, container tracking portals refreshed all day by clients and drivers. Telematics is a steady stream of small writes from thousands of devices, and the tracking portal is what a client checks instead of phoning. Neither tolerates a maintenance window, and both are trivially poolable behind one address.
Financial services and fintech
Agent-banking backends, USSD gateways, KYC document stores, reconciliation and settlement jobs, reporting into the Bank of Tanzania. The batch work has a monthly rhythm; the agent-facing tier has to keep answering while it runs. Splitting those across a pool, with health checks deciding who serves, is the ordinary way to stop a settlement run from being visible to an agent in Mbeya.
Tourism and hospitality
2.29 million international arrivals and USD 3.9 billion in travel receipts in 2025, with Arusha and Zanzibar as the operational centres. Booking engines, channel managers, property management integrations and payment pages carry a pronounced season, and a failed availability call during it is a booking that goes to another operator. The guests are mostly overseas, so the right shape is a pool in Dar es Salaam with a CDN in front — and the staff and the reservations desk, who use the system all day, are local.
Agencies, ISVs and resellers
Dar es Salaam holds 66.5% of Tanzanian startups, clustered on the Ali Hassan Mwinyi Road corridor, and they run many client sites on a handful of machines. One balancer in front of a pool turns a patching window into an ordinary afternoon: take a backend out of rotation, work on it, and let the health check decide when it is fit to serve again.
Cloud servers, VPS, dedicated hardware and object storage are live in tz-1a today and are what a balancer will sit in front of. Load Balancers themselves are launching soon — join the waitlist through [email protected] or +255 761 847 121.
Before launch
What is standing in front of your servers today
NGINX or HAProxy on a VPS you maintain
The common Tanzanian case, and it works until the week it does not. That proxy is one machine to patch, monitor, renew certificates on and fail over, and everything behind it depends on it — the cheapest component in the stack and the single point of failure at the same time. A managed balancer takes that job off your rota. The preparation that pays before launch costs nothing: make your backends interchangeable, move sessions out of local memory, and put a health endpoint on each machine that tells the truth about whether it can serve.
One server doing everything, in one building
The other shape is no balancer at all — a single instance carrying the web tier, the database and the uploads, with a maintenance window announced by email. That is fine until the workload starts having consequences for people who are not on your team: a clearing agent who cannot file, a field officer whose deadline is tonight, a subscriber whose top-up will not go through. Splitting the front tier into two interchangeable backends is the step that makes a balancer useful the day it lands, and it is worth doing now.
Three questions are worth putting to any provider, this one included. Which building is the machine in, and in which country? Is domestic traffic exchanged inside Tanzania? And what does the uptime SLA pay when it is missed, and who claims it?
FAQ
Questions, answered
It sits in front of your servers on a single IP and distributes incoming traffic across them. If a backend fails, traffic reroutes to healthy servers automatically — better availability, better performance, no single point of failure.
A flat monthly rate per size tier — Small, Medium, Large, or Enterprise. Data transfer between the load balancer and backends in the same region is unlimited and included. No per-request charges, no hidden fees.
Yes. Backends can be Lineserve Cloud Servers, VPS, dedicated servers, Kubernetes nodes — or servers hosted anywhere else, as long as the load balancer can reach them over the network.
Upload certificates to the load balancer and it terminates SSL/TLS for you, offloading encryption from your backends. TLS 1.2 and 1.3 are supported, with SNI for serving multiple certificates from one load balancer and automatic renewal.
The load balancer probes each backend over HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, or ICMP on an interval you set. Servers that fail their threshold are removed from the pool automatically and re-added once they recover.
Sticky sessions route a returning client to the same backend — essential for apps that keep session state locally. Choose cookie-based or source-IP persistence per load balancer.
Round Robin for evenly matched servers, Least Connections for long-lived connections, Source IP Hash to pin clients to a server, and Weighted Round Robin to send more traffic to bigger machines.
Yes. Upgrade or downgrade anytime with zero downtime — your configuration, certificates, and backend pools carry over unchanged.
They are in build and there is no public date yet. Dar es Salaam (tz-1a) is one of the regions in the first release. Join the waitlist through [email protected] and you will hear from us when there is something to point at.
Indicative launch pricing runs from TZS 40,000 a month for Small, TZS 80,000 for Medium, TZS 130,000 for Large and TZS 260,000 for Enterprise — flat monthly figures per balancer, with no per-request charges. Those numbers are indicative until launch and exclude VAT.
Early access is being allocated by workload rather than by queue position. Tell [email protected] what you would put behind a balancer, how many backends and which protocols, and that conversation is how a place is reserved.
Not yet. Load Balancers are launching soon, and this page shows what they will look like when they land. Cloud servers, VPS, dedicated hardware and object storage in tz-1a are live now and are what a balancer will sit in front of.
In the region you create it in. For a Tanzanian deployment that is tz-1a, Dar es Salaam — the same city as your backends, so the hop between the balancer and the pool stays inside the metro and is included in the flat price.
HTTP, HTTPS, TCP and UDP, dual-stack on IPv4 and IPv6 at every tier, across Round Robin, Least Connections, Source IP Hash and Weighted Round Robin. Session persistence is available as cookie-based or source-IP sticky sessions where a client has to stay pinned to one backend.
Yes. TLS 1.2 and 1.3 with SNI for multiple certificates, automatic renewal, and the encryption work taken off your backends.
Health checks probe your backends over HTTP, HTTPS, TCP or ICMP with intervals, timeouts and recovery thresholds you set. A backend that stops passing drops out of the pool and traffic reroutes to the healthy ones, with no manual intervention, and it is returned to rotation once it passes again.
A load balancer serves a pool of backends in its own region, which is what the included unlimited same-region transfer covers. Teams wanting a presence in more than one of Dar es Salaam, Nairobi and Lagos run a balancer in each region and steer between them at the DNS layer, which stays under their control.
In Tanzanian Shillings, by M-Pesa, bank transfer or card — the same methods as everything else on a Tanzanian account. Tiers move up or down without downtime. Displayed prices exclude VAT, and the 18% is shown separately at checkout.
They reach Dar es Salaam over the National ICT Broadband Backbone — 13,820 km of state fibre reaching every region — rather than over an international path. One entry point in tz-1a covers upcountry Tanzania, and what a balancer adds is that the entry point survives losing a backend.
That is the shape it exists for. Add backends before the reporting deadline or the season and take them away afterwards, with the address in front unchanged. The balancer tier itself moves up and down without downtime, so the capacity decision is reversible.
For Tanzanian users reaching a Dar es Salaam balancer in front of Dar es Salaam backends, the request path stays inside the country, and the certificate, connection and access logs are held in tz-1a. That gives you data residency for Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act.
Not for data that stays in Tanzania — the permit regime governs transfers out of the country, and that question does not arise for a request path held in Dar es Salaam. A copy of personal data placed in ke-1a or ng-1a is a different matter, and your own obligations as a controller are unchanged either way.
Yes — balancers are created and managed from a REST API and a Terraform provider as well as the console, so they belong in the same pipeline as the rest of your infrastructure.
Yes: +255 761 847 121, alongside [email protected] and the ticket system. Tanzania is on East Africa Time year-round with no daylight saving, so a change window means one thing all year.
Put a load balancer in front of it — soon
Load Balancers are launching soon. Talk to us to reserve early access and pricing in your local currency, with no card to start.
Launching soon · 99.99% uptime SLA · Billed in TZS