Block Storage — hosted in Kampala
Block volumes in Kampala
The disk your database sits on, separated from the machine you are afraid to touch.
Most Ugandan teams meet this product on a bad afternoon: the volume is nearly full, the database is slower than the numbers say it should be, and the only plan anyone has is rebuilding a server that has quietly been carrying the business for two years. Block Storage takes that apart. Storage is created separately from the instance, attached to it, grown while it is mounted, snapshotted before anything irreversible, and left standing when the machine is gone. It is coming to ug-1a in Kampala on SSD, NVMe and HDD tiers, from 10 GB to 16 TB, priced in shillings. Tell us what you would put on one and you will hear when it is ready.
- Volumes in ug-1a, our Kampala region
- Data residency for Uganda's Data Protection and Privacy Act — your data stays in-country
- SSD, NVMe and HDD tiers, 10 GB to 16 TB
- Grow a volume without rebuilding the server under it
- Launching soon — priced and billed in UGX
Launching soon · Billed in UGX
Pricing
Three tiers, one per-GB price
Pick SSD, NVMe, or HDD to match your workload, then pay only for the size you provision. In your currency, no forex.
| Tier | Price /GB/mo | IOPS | Throughput | Volume sizes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Standard SSDPopular | UGX 940 | Up to 10,000 IOPS | 250 MB/s | 10 GB – 16 TB |
| High-Performance NVMe | UGX 1,600 | Up to 64,000 IOPS | 1 GB/s | 10 GB – 16 TB |
| Standard HDD | UGX 560 | Up to 500 IOPS | 200 MB/s | 50 GB – 16 TB |
Volumes are billed on their provisioned size, metered hourly and totalled monthly — detached volumes are still billed until deleted. Snapshots are $0.15/GB/mo, and cross-region snapshot copies are $0.02/GB one-time. Prices exclude VAT; local currency figures are indicative and settled at checkout.
Why the country matters for a disk
Uganda is landlocked, and a restore is measured in gigabytes
A volume feels like the least geographic thing in a stack. It is a disk. It sits under one instance, in one rack, and nothing about a filesystem call cares where the continent ends. Right up until the day you have to move the contents — a restore, a rebuild, a migration, a copy taken for an auditor — and then the country the disk is in decides how long your week is.
Uganda has no coastline and no cable landing station. Every international path out of Kampala is hauled 900 kilometres and more overland before it reaches the sea: east across Kenya from the Mombasa landings through Malaba or Busia, or south across Tanzania from Dar es Salaam through Mutukula. Pulling 500 GB back from a European provider crosses that haul in the wrong direction while somebody watches a progress bar. Pulling it from a volume in ug-1a to an instance in ug-1a crosses a city.
The other half is what the disk is attached to. There is no hyperscale cloud region in Uganda — Amazon's African region is Cape Town, Microsoft's are in South Africa, Google's is Johannesburg, and the nearest edge sits in Nairobi, which is another country with another regulator. A volume in ug-1a attaches to an instance in ug-1a, which is answering Ugandan users over Ugandan fibre. Compute, disk and audience end up in the same jurisdiction not because it was an architectural principle, but because that is where the work is.
~900–1,000 km
Overland fibre between Kampala and the nearest coast
16 TB
Largest single volume planned for the first release
0
Hyperscale cloud regions inside Uganda
UGX
Quoted, invoiced and settled — no forex on a monthly storage line
A volume is one instance's disk
That is the whole distinction, and it decides which of the three storage products you want. A block volume attaches to a single instance and carries a filesystem your database reads and writes through ordinary file operations. A shared directory several servers mount at once is File Storage. Buckets reached over an S3 API are Object Storage, which is live in ug-1a today. Most systems end up wanting more than one of them, in the same region.
The server in the corner of the office
Ugandan on-premises infrastructure carries a risk the spreadsheet rarely prices. Distribution moved from Umeme to UEDCL on 1 April 2025 and the transition has been visible — inherited ageing assets, load shedding taken to allow repairs — with tariffs above UGX 600 per kWh pushing businesses onto diesel. A database that loses power mid-write is not a downtime problem, it is a corruption problem, and it is usually discovered a week later in a backup taken of the corrupt copy. A volume in ug-1a is not a disk that depends on your building.
The platform
Everything a production volume needs
Provisioning, snapshots, encryption, and monitoring come wired in — so your data outlives any single server.
Instant provisioning
Create a volume and have it ready to attach in seconds, straight from the console or API.
Live resizing
Grow a volume on the fly and extend the filesystem with no downtime and no reattach.
Instant incremental snapshots
Point-in-time snapshots capture only changed blocks, so backups are fast and cheap.
99.999% durability
Every block is replicated three times within the region to survive hardware failure.
Encryption at rest
Volumes are encrypted with AES-256, with optional bring-your-own-key management.
Flexible attachment
Detach a volume from one instance and reattach it to another in the same region.
Boot volume support
Use a block volume as a bootable root disk, or as extra data disks alongside it.
Full API access
Create, attach, resize, and snapshot volumes from Terraform, the CLI, or your CI.
Monitoring & alerts
Track IOPS, throughput, and latency per volume, with alerts when they cross a threshold.
Regions
Kampala is home. The other three are a border you choose to cross.
Deploy in ug-1a and the machine is in Kampala, in the country its users are already standing in. The region is chosen per instance rather than per account, so nothing about this decision is permanent or global: a production database in Kampala, a build runner wherever is convenient, a backup target somewhere else entirely, all on the same key and the same API.
The other three are Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and Lagos, on that same account, the same API and the same shilling invoice. Here is where a Ugandan buyer has to read the map differently from everyone else on it. For a business in Nairobi, ke-1a is home. For you it is abroad twice over: a copy of Ugandan personal data held there is a transfer out of Uganda that belongs in your section 19 record, and a request served from there still crosses the border at Malaba or Busia before it reaches your customer. Regional is not the same word as local, and Uganda is the market where the difference is easiest to see.
That said, the corridor is real and some businesses genuinely live on it. Trade moves between Kampala, Kisumu, Nairobi and Mombasa; the crude pipeline out of the Albertine region runs 1,443 km to Tanga on the Tanzanian coast; freight, agri-export, logistics and contracting firms bill customers in three countries. When your operation is actually in two markets, tz-1a or ke-1a stops being a distant region and becomes the second half of your own footprint. And when what you want is somewhere to put a standby, a replica or an offsite copy, another region on the same account is a configuration change rather than a second supplier to onboard.
Uganda
Kampala
~3 ms
typical, within metro · Data stays in Uganda
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
Use cases
Built for what you're building
Database storage
Consistent IOPS for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB, with the durability transactional data demands.
Kubernetes persistent volumes
Our CSI driver provisions volumes straight from your PVCs, so stateful pods keep their data.
Logs & analytics
HDD throughput at a low per-GB price for append-heavy logs, media, and analytics stores.
Backup & DR
Instant snapshots plus cross-region copies give you point-in-time backups and disaster recovery.
How it works
From zero to mounted in three steps
Create a volume
Pick a tier and a size from 10 GB to 16 TB, and your volume is ready in seconds.
Attach & format
Attach it to an instance and format it as ext4, XFS, or NTFS — then mount and go.
Grow as you go
Resize the volume live as you fill it, and snapshot it on demand for backups.
Uptime SLA
99.9%
- DDoS filtering is included, and so is the traffic
- Service credits applied automatically when we miss the SLA
- Measured monthly, per region, on network and power availability
Support
East Africa Time all year, and a queue that already knows Uganda
Two channels with two different jobs. A signed-in ticket arrives already carrying the account, the region and the instance, so the first reply is about the fault rather than about which machine you meant. [email protected] is the commercial door: a quotation against a purchase order, transfer details ahead of a payment run rather than during it, a billing account configured with your TIN and registered name before the first invoice, and the SLA terms and credit process in writing while you are still choosing.
Ahead of both sits status.lineserve.net. A region-wide event is published there while a reply is still being typed, and thirty seconds on it turns "the site is down" into "my instance is unreachable and the status page is clear" — a different ticket, and a far shorter one.
What that ticket should carry, in the order it is read: the region and the instance, the EAT time the behaviour started, the last thing that changed before it, the actual error text rather than a description of it, and whether it reproduces from more than one Ugandan network. That last one carries more weight here than almost anywhere. Uganda is a two-operator market, and an MTN handset, an Airtel handset and an office fibre line disagreeing about your service is a completely different fault from all three failing together — it is worth thirty seconds of your time and it can save an hour of everyone's.
Uganda runs on East Africa Time, UTC+3, and has never observed daylight saving, so a change window agreed in EAT means the same thing in January and in July. You share that clock exactly with Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and sit two hours ahead of Lagos, which matters when you are scheduling work across regions. The Ugandan commercial day generally runs 08:00 to 17:00, Monday to Friday. One scheduling detail that catches people out: a Ugandan public holiday falling on a weekend stays on that date rather than moving to the Monday, so the calendar is not the same shape as some of its neighbours'.
The last part of local support is vocabulary rather than hours. The person reading your ticket knows what an operator collections callback is and why it retries, knows what the border crossing at Malaba has to do with the traceroute you are staring at, and knows why your finance office wants a TIN on the document before the first billing run. None of that has to be explained before the actual problem can be. Buy from somewhere that has never sold into Uganda and the first twenty minutes of every serious ticket go on describing the country.
Sales
[email protected]Why Lineserve
Beyond the local disk
An instance's local disk disappears the moment the instance does, can't move, and can't grow. Block volumes are independent, portable, and durable — while still keeping your data on the continent.
Pricing & invoicing
A shilling line that does not move when anything else does
Block storage bills on the size you provisioned rather than the size you filled. A 500 GB volume is a 500 GB volume whether the filesystem is empty or full, metered hourly and totalled monthly, and it is still billed while it sits detached after the instance is deleted; billing stops when you delete the volume. That is the rule to know before you size anything, and it also makes this the most forecastable line in a storage estate — the charge does not move when your traffic does, because nothing about it depends on how well the product is doing.
The tier is the cost decision rather than the size. Indicative launch pricing puts Standard HDD at UGX 560 per GB a month, Standard SSD at UGX 940 and High-Performance NVMe at UGX 1,600, so a log volume and a ledger volume of the same size are deliberately different numbers. Every figure comes from Uganda's own price list rather than a dollar rate converted when the page loads, which is what makes a twelve-month forecast possible — and it means a Ugandan business settles it in shillings by MTN Mobile Money, Airtel Money, bank transfer or card, with no forex and no international transaction on the statement.
Uganda's VAT rate on this class of service is 18%, administered by the Uganda Revenue Authority, whose published list of taxable electronic services opens with web hosting — the scope question a finance team would otherwise have to research is already answered. Displayed prices exclude VAT and it is shown separately at checkout. Uganda's invoicing regime is EFRIS, and it has a consequence worth planning for rather than discovering: URA treats a VAT credit claimed on a purchase not supported by an e-invoice as non-compliance, and information technology and communications is one of the sectors required to use the system.
Four fields, sent once
Your TIN, your registered name exactly as URA holds it, a billing email that reaches finance rather than an engineer, and any purchase-order, grant or cost-centre reference the document has to carry. Send them to [email protected] when you join the waitlist and the billing account is configured once instead of corrected in the third quarter.
Volumes grow, they do not shrink
Resizing upward happens while the volume is attached and in use, then you extend the filesystem. There is no equivalent in the other direction, so the discipline on a provisioned-size product is to start close to what you need and grow into it — and to keep seasonal headroom on compute, which does give it back.
Raise withholding at account opening, not at year end
Uganda replaced its 5% digital services tax with a 15% withholding tax on non-residents' digital services income from 1 July 2025, and section 84 of the Income Tax Act applies 15% to payments to non-resident service providers, subject to treaty relief. The contracting entity is LINESERVE, INC. On a storage line this is a small number that recurs indefinitely, so put it in front of your adviser early and copy [email protected] on what your remittance process needs to see.
Prices are indicative launch pricing and exclude VAT; Uganda's 18% is calculated and shown at checkout. Snapshots bill separately from the volume they were taken from.
Data residency
The live disk is the one the regulator would ask about
Archives are the easy half of a residency conversation, because everybody knows where the archive is. The harder half is the disk a running system is writing to right now: the ledger a wallet integration appends to when a collection lands, the member table a teller updates, the loan book a scoring job reads across, the case file a caseworker opens six weeks later. On a cloud, that disk is a block volume, and it is entirely possible to move your backups into Uganda while the live records stay in somebody else's jurisdiction.
Uganda's Data Protection and Privacy Act, 2019 — Chapter 97 of the Laws of Uganda — is enforced by the Personal Data Protection Office, established within NITA-U and operational since August 2021. Section 29 requires data collectors, processors and controllers to register, expressly including entities outside Uganda that collect or process Ugandan citizens' personal data, with annual renewal. Section 19 permits transfer abroad only where the destination country's protection is at least equivalent to the Act's, or where the data subject consents, and Regulation 30(2) requires consent for onward transfers.
Uganda does not run a per-transfer permit regime, but it does expect evidence. The PDPO has said entities must keep records of the legal basis, safeguards and justification for cross-border transfers, available for inspection during an audit, a compliance check or an investigation — and in July 2025 it decided a complaint against a foreign company with no Ugandan establishment on precisely those grounds, ordering it to register and to produce a compliant transfer framework. Penalties under the Act reach 245 currency points or 2% of annual gross turnover for a corporation, and section 23 requires immediate notification of a breach.
At launch, a volume created in ug-1a is held in Kampala and does not leave Uganda without your instruction. That is data residency for Uganda's Data Protection and Privacy Act. What a hosting provider supplies is the location; the registration, the records of processing and the assessment stay with your own compliance function, and they are a shorter piece of work when the live records never left the country.
The snapshot is where a decision quietly comes undone
Snapshots are fast, cheap and trivially easy to point at another region, which makes them the part of a design that reverses a residency choice without a meeting. A snapshot kept in ug-1a is durability. A snapshot copied to Nairobi, Dar es Salaam or Lagos is Ugandan personal data in another country, with section 19 in play and a record expected to exist for it. Build artefacts and logs carrying neither raise no question at all.
Replication is not a backup
Redundancy inside the region survives a failed drive. It does not survive a dropped table, a bad migration or a script run at the end of a long night, and it is not a second copy in a second place. Snapshots, and dumps into object storage in ug-1a, cover those without leaving Uganda — and each of them is a separate decision about where a copy lives.
Who is asking for this
The Ugandan systems that are really waiting on a volume
Block storage gets bought for a specific problem rather than a strategy: a disk that is filling, a database that wants more from it than it is getting, or a machine that has become too important to rebuild.
Wallet ledgers and lending backends
Uganda's mobile money market runs 2.55 billion transactions a quarter across two operators, and the systems plugged into it keep a transactional database under sub-second expectations: balances, journal entries, callback payloads from two different collections APIs, reconciliation across a day of them, and an audit trail that grows and never shrinks. High-Performance NVMe is the tier that workload is describing when it complains about the disk, and the volume it wants is one that outlives every instance rebuild between now and the next funding round.
SACCOs, microfinance and core banking
Tier 4 institutions licensed by the Uganda Microfinance Regulatory Authority, and the banks and SACCOs above them, run core systems where the data files are the institution. Month-end and dividend runs hammer the disk for three days and leave it alone for twenty-seven. Separating the volume from the instance turns a capacity problem into a resize and turns a hardware refresh into a detach and reattach, rather than a weekend everybody remembers.
The rack in the office, and the grid it sits behind
A great deal of Ugandan business data still lives on a machine in a server room with a generator outside. Since distribution passed to UEDCL on 1 April 2025 the transition has been visible, and tariffs above UGX 600 per kWh make diesel an expensive habit. Moving that database onto a volume in ug-1a takes the write path off a disk that depends on your building being powered, and converts an unpredictable fuel line into a fixed monthly shilling one.
ISPs, telcos and network operators
Roke Telkom, CSquared, Liquid, BCS Group, Tangerine, Paratus, the two mobile networks and the research network behind Uganda's universities all buy capacity for the systems around their infrastructure: RADIUS and AAA, billing and provisioning, NetFlow collection, monitoring retention, IPAM, DNS. Continuous writes, unglamorous growth, and a hard requirement to be inside the country to be useful at all. One volume per system, resized when subscriber growth says so rather than when a plan expires.
Oil, gas and Albertine contractors
Document control, HSE and incident records, procurement and tender archives, survey data, and telematics ingest from fleets working Hoima, Buliisa and Kikuube. The pattern is a database plus a working directory that grows steadily for the life of a contract and must be produced intact when somebody audits it years later. That is a volume you grow, snapshot on a schedule and never rebuild.
Universities, LMS and research data
Term start is the peak: a learning platform that is quiet for weeks and then carries every student at once, a student information system behind it, an institutional repository that only ever grows, and research datasets that outlive the machine they were collected on. Volumes let the compute be seasonal while the data is permanent, which is the correct way round for an institution whose budget year and academic year do not match.
Agencies, ISVs and resellers
Kampala's agency market resells infrastructure to SME clients — many client systems on one account, each with its own database and its own habit of outgrowing whatever it was put on. Independent volumes turn that from a rebuild per client into a resize per client, with a snapshot before every plugin update, framework upgrade and handover.
Indicative launch pricing in shillings: Standard SSD from UGX 940 per GB a month, High-Performance NVMe from UGX 1,600, Standard HDD from UGX 560, billed on provisioned size. Prices exclude VAT. These are the launch figures rather than a charge you can incur today.
Planning ahead
How your data gets onto a volume when it lands
From the disk your server came with
The most common Ugandan starting point and the quickest move, because the data is already in Kampala on a Lineserve instance — on storage that dies with the machine and cannot grow past the plan it arrived on. At launch the move is to attach a volume, copy the directory across, remount it at the same path and carry on; the application never learns anything changed. What you gain is separation. The instance becomes something you can rebuild without a committee, and the database stops being the reason nobody touches it.
From a provider outside Uganda
Worth knowing early that this is not a bucket-to-bucket story. Two block volumes do not speak a protocol to each other; they are disks, and disks are copied at the filesystem level — bring the instance up in ug-1a with its volume attached and formatted, move the data with rsync, and cut over, or use the database's own replication if you would rather measure downtime in seconds. Snapshot the source first, and budget for the fact that every byte comes back across the overland haul from the coast. Three things change afterwards: the bill becomes one shilling figure you can forecast, the charge stops being a foreign transaction, and the live records come inside Uganda.
Tell [email protected] how much data you would put on a volume, what is reading it today and when you need it, and you will hear from us when there is something to attach. Migration planning and assistance are included at no extra charge.
FAQ
Questions, answered
Your instance's local storage lives and dies with the instance. A Block Storage volume is independent — detach it, reattach it to another instance, resize it live, and snapshot it. Delete the server and the volume, and your data, survives.
Standard SSD delivers up to 10,000 IOPS and suits web apps, dev environments, and small databases. High-Performance NVMe reaches 64,000 IOPS and 1 GB/s for demanding databases and real-time analytics. Standard HDD favours cheap throughput for logs, media, and backups.
Yes. Volumes resize instantly while attached and in use — then you extend the filesystem (resize2fs for ext4, xfs_growfs for XFS). Volumes can only grow, not shrink.
Snapshots are instant and incremental — only changed blocks are stored after the first one. Restore a volume to any snapshot, or clone a snapshot into a new volume. Snapshot storage bills at $0.15/GB per month.
Every volume is replicated three times across separate physical drives, and failed drives are reconstructed automatically. That yields 99.999% durability with a 99.99% availability SLA.
Yes. Use volumes as boot disks with custom OS images, resize the boot disk as you grow, and move a bootable volume between instances.
Yes. Volumes are encrypted with AES-256 before data touches disk, using platform-managed keys or your own via KMS. Data in transit is encrypted too.
You pay for provisioned size, metered hourly, whether or not the volume is attached — a 100 GB Standard SSD volume costs $25.30 a month. Billing stops when you delete the volume.
Volumes range from 10 GB (50 GB on HDD) up to 16 TB, with up to 16 volumes attached per instance. Account limits are raised on request.
It is in build and there is no public date. Send [email protected] the workload and the rough size you would need and you go on the list — you hear from us when there is something to attach rather than when a calendar says so.
Tell [email protected] what you would run on it, on which tier and at what size. Those conversations decide what ships first, and the teams having them are the ones we come back to when there is something to try.
In ug-1a, our Kampala region. A volume is created in a region and stays there — it attaches to instances in that same region, and it does not leave Uganda unless you copy a snapshot out yourself.
Indicative launch pricing is UGX 940 per GB a month for Standard SSD, UGX 1,600 for High-Performance NVMe and UGX 560 for Standard HDD, billed on provisioned size and metered hourly, with snapshots billed separately. Prices exclude VAT. Those are the figures we expect to open with, published so you can plan against them.
In Uganda Shillings, by MTN Mobile Money, Airtel Money, bank transfer or card — the same methods as the rest of your account. Wallets suit a small monthly line; a transfer suits anything with an approval behind it.
No. Displayed prices exclude VAT. Uganda's standard rate is 18%, administered by the Uganda Revenue Authority, and it is calculated and shown separately at checkout.
Because it lives and dies with the server, cannot move, and cannot grow past the plan it came with. A volume outlives the instance, detaches and reattaches to another machine in the same region, and resizes while it is mounted. The difference shows up on the day you want a bigger machine, and on the day you no longer want that one.
Object storage is an S3 API you write buckets to over HTTP — right for archives, media and anything a browser fetches. A block volume is a disk attached to one instance, with a filesystem on it, that your database reads and writes through ordinary file operations. Buckets hold what you keep; volumes hold what you are working on.
No — a block volume attaches to one instance at a time. Shared access across a fleet is what File Storage is for, and it is on the same launch path.
Yes. Volumes created in ug-1a are held in Kampala and are not moved out of the country without your instruction, which gives you data residency for Uganda's Data Protection and Privacy Act.
It settles the location, which is the part a hosting provider supplies. Registration with the Personal Data Protection Office, your records of processing and your section 19 records stay with you as controller — and the last of those is a shorter document when the live personal data never left Uganda.
Cross-region snapshot copies are planned, on the same account as ug-1a. Make the call deliberately: a copy of Ugandan personal data in another country is a cross-border transfer under section 19, and the PDPO expects the record explaining its legal basis and safeguards to exist if it asks for it.
Yes. Creating, attaching, resizing and snapshotting are API and CLI operations on the same account and credentials as the rest of the platform, so a volume is something your pipeline provisions rather than something somebody remembers to click.
Customer references are available under NDA for the products that are live today. Tell [email protected] what you are building and you will be pointed at the closest match.
Persistent volumes are almost here
Block Storage is launching soon, close to your users and billed in local currency. Talk to us to line up early access and be first to attach a volume.
Launching soon · 99.999% durability · Billed in UGX