CentOS — where the estate goes next
CentOS VPS Hosting in Uganda
In Uganda, CentOS is now a decision rather than a default.
CentOS Linux stopped being the free rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and a good number of Ugandan servers never got the memo: a panel box in a Kampala agency, a reporting server at a SACCO, a lab machine on a university network, an integration host somebody's contractor built in 2017. Each still working. Each quietly out of updates. CentOS Stream 9 in ug-1a gives that estate somewhere current to stand while you decide where it finally lives.
- CentOS Stream 9, deployed in Kampala in under 60 seconds
- dnf, systemd and SELinux exactly where your runbooks expect them
- Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux on the same account when you choose one
- Snapshot before every step, roll back in a click
- Billed in Uganda Shillings · 99.9% uptime SLA
No credit card required · Billed in UGX
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.
The network
The reason it went abroad has expired
Look at when these servers were built. A Ugandan business standing up a CentOS box in 2016 or 2017 had a thin set of options at home, so the machine went to Europe or to a rack in the office, and it has been there ever since. Neither of those decisions was wrong at the time. Both were made about a country that has changed.
What changed: Uganda's fibre network reached 80,257 kilometres by June 2026, on UCC's own quarterly reporting. There are now several distinct international paths out of the country — a Kampala–Malaba corridor toward Mombasa, a Nairobi–Kisumu–Kampala route crossing at Malaba and Busia, a Goma–Kigali–Kampala–Mombasa path, and the national backbone's crossing at Mutukula toward Dar es Salaam. And Ugandan networks have somewhere in Kampala to hand traffic to each other: UIXP, running since 2001, with Akamai, Meta, MTN Uganda, Liquid, Tangerine, Paratus, SEACOM and the national research network all on the participant list.
What did not change is the geography. Uganda is landlocked and there is still no cable landing station inside it, so a server in Europe means every request from a Ugandan user goes overland to the coast, under an ocean and back. And the nearest full hyperscaler region is at the other end of the continent — Cape Town or Johannesburg — with the closest edge sitting in another country entirely. Migrating the estate is the one moment you get to fix both the operating system and the location for the same amount of downtime.
2001
Year UIXP began exchanging Ugandan traffic in Kampala
4
Distinct international fibre corridors out of Uganda
0
Hyperscaler regions between Kampala and Johannesburg
Why CentOS Stream
Why CentOS Stream on Lineserve
CentOS Stream sits between Fedora and RHEL: the same enterprise base, continuously updated, a step ahead of what ships in RHEL — with dnf, systemd and SELinux exactly where your runbooks expect them.
- The RHEL family's tooling and layout — dnf, systemd, SELinux.
- Continuously delivered updates that preview the next RHEL minor release.
- A familiar home for teams with years of CentOS experience.
- The image is free on every plan — you only pay for the server.
CentOS Stream images
Updated regularly
Use cases
What people run on CentOS Stream
CentOS-era workloads
Web servers, PHP stacks and services your team has run on CentOS for years.
Tracking RHEL's direction
See what's coming to RHEL, Rocky and AlmaLinux before it ships.
CI & compatibility testing
Validate your software against the next RHEL minor before your customers hit it.
Containers & Podman
Rootless containers with the RHEL family's Podman tooling built in.
Databases
PostgreSQL, MySQL or MariaDB on NVMe, with SELinux enforcing by default.
Infrastructure services
Monitoring, DNS and the glue services enterprise networks run on.
Where the data sits
An estate that has been abroad since 2017
The servers on this page have been quietly accumulating Ugandan personal data for the best part of a decade — client databases, member records, student files, subscriber tables — on machines in a country nobody at your organisation chose deliberately. That was an unremarkable decision when it was made. It is a harder one to explain now.
Uganda's Data Protection and Privacy Act allows personal data to leave the country, but section 19 asks the organisation sending it to be able to evidence why the transfer is lawful, and to keep those records available when an inspection comes. The Personal Data Protection Office has already shown it will ask, including of an offshore company with no establishment here. A migration is the cheapest moment you will ever get to make that question stop applying to this particular estate.
Land the rebuilt instance in ug-1a and the database volume, the uploads directory and the logs are all in Kampala. That is data residency for the Act, described as a location rather than a status — and for a board paper explaining what changed in the migration, a location is the part that reads well.
Who runs here
The Ugandan CentOS estate, and what becomes of it
Almost nobody starts a new Ugandan project on CentOS in 2026. Everybody who lands on this page already has one, and the useful question is what the next box looks like.
The panel server that has been up since 2018
A control panel, thirty or forty client accounts, PHP versions nobody dares touch, and a distribution that stopped receiving updates underneath all of it. Most Kampala hosting estates in this position end up on AlmaLinux, because that is what the panel vendors support — our AlmaLinux page is the honest destination for this one, and Stream 9 is a reasonable place to test the move first.
Reporting and integration hosts in financial services
A SACCO's month-end reporting server, a Tier 4 lender's reconciliation jobs against two mobile money providers, an integration box built by a contractor who has since moved on. These migrate within the Red Hat family rather than away from it, because the scripts, the file layout, the SELinux policy and the service names all assume it.
University and research machines
Lab servers, institutional repositories and departmental application hosts on campuses reached by the national research network. Long-lived, sparsely funded, and staffed by people whose CentOS habits go back a decade. Stream 9 keeps every one of those habits intact while putting the machine back inside a support window.
Telecom and ISP back-office
Provisioning, billing, monitoring and DNS at a Ugandan operator or regional ISP, on a base the team standardised on years ago. These buyers read a traceroute before they read a sales page, and the argument that lands with them is that a Kampala instance keeps domestic traffic domestic.
Compatibility testing before the RHEL family moves
Stream sits ahead of RHEL rather than behind it, so a package that will argue with your Rocky or AlmaLinux production fleet argues here first. One small instance in ug-1a is a much cheaper way to discover that than a release weekend.
The application nobody has permission to change
Vendor software installed years ago, still under a support contract, still specifying a Red Hat-family base. Stream 9 gives it a current, patched platform without asking anyone to open a conversation with the vendor about a distribution change — a conversation that in Uganda usually involves an implementation partner and a procurement cycle.
Moving it
Two Ugandan estates, two different jobs
From a CentOS 7 box in a European datacentre
The application still works, which is why nobody has touched it. Start by proving the move rather than committing to it: deploy a Stream 9 instance in ug-1a, rsync the document root and the database dump across, run the two side by side for a fortnight and point a staging hostname at the new one. dnf, SELinux contexts and the service names are all where your existing runbook says they are, so this is a copy rather than a rewrite. When you cut the DNS over, the second thing your users get — after a supported operating system — is a server that stopped crossing an ocean to answer them.
From the tower in the server room
This one is usually an integration host, a reporting server or a panel box that ended up in the office because there was nowhere else to put it in 2017. It now depends on an office internet link, a distribution grid that changed operator in April 2025, and a diesel generator that costs more per unit than the grid does. Snapshot it, rebuild the same stack on a Stream 9 instance in ug-1a, and move the data over a weekend. The workload keeps its country and its runbook; it loses its dependency on whether the office had power that afternoon.
Take a snapshot at every step. A migration you can roll back in a click is a migration you can attempt on a Tuesday.
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
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]FAQ
Questions, answered
CentOS Stream 9. CentOS Linux was discontinued upstream — Stream is its continuation, sitting just ahead of RHEL rather than just behind it. If you want the classic rebuild-of-RHEL experience, we also offer Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux.
For most workloads, yes — it's the same enterprise base as RHEL with continuously delivered, tested updates. Teams that want fixed point releases with a ten-year lifecycle usually pick Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux instead; all three are free on every plan.
CentOS Stream 9 is available at deploy time and kept current. You can also bring your own image with a custom ISO.
Yes. All Linux images, CentOS Stream included, are free on every plan — the plan price is the full price of the server.
Yes. Every CentOS Stream 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. The cleanest route is to deploy a fresh Rocky or AlmaLinux server and migrate your workload — deploys take under a minute, and your runbooks carry over almost unchanged. Snapshot first, as always.
Every plan supports on-demand snapshots and scheduled automated backups. Snapshot storage is billed per GB beyond your included allowance.
No, and the difference is worth knowing before you move. CentOS Linux was a rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux that arrived after it. Stream is continuously delivered and sits ahead of the next RHEL minor release. The tooling is identical — dnf, systemd, SELinux — but the update model is not, which is why plenty of Ugandan estates use Stream as a staging post rather than a destination.
If the workload is a hosting panel, AlmaLinux — that is what the panel vendors support. If a software vendor or a contract names Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Rocky Linux. If it is your own application and nothing is forcing your hand, Ubuntu or Debian are both reasonable. All four images are free on the same plans in ug-1a, so the cost of trying one is a few hours.
Close to it, if you build in parallel. Deploy the new instance, copy the data, test against a staging hostname, and keep the old box running until you are satisfied. The cutover is then a DNS change rather than a rebuild, and the old server stays available to fall back to for as long as you want to pay for it.
For most of these estates, one extra plan for a few weeks. A 4 GB instance is UGX 158,000 a month and an 8 GB instance is UGX 310,000, so running a parallel copy for a fortnight costs a fraction of the month it would take to plan a big-bang cutover. Prices exclude VAT, and 18% is added at checkout.
For Ugandan users, yes. Uganda is landlocked, so a server abroad means every uncached request travels overland to Mombasa or Dar es Salaam, crosses an ocean and comes back. Bringing the same estate into ug-1a takes that journey out of every page load, every login and every report your staff run.
That is the reason to stay inside the Red Hat family rather than leave it. Package names, service names, file locations, firewalld, dnf and SELinux behave as your existing documentation describes. What normally needs attention is the software layered on top — older PHP or Python interpreters, a database version that has since moved on — not the base.
In shillings, by MTN Mobile Money, Airtel Money, bank transfer or card. For an estate move, most Ugandan buyers settle on a bank transfer once several instances are running on one account, because it reconciles as a single monthly figure.
In ug-1a, in Kampala — the database volume, the uploads and the logs. That is data residency for Uganda's Data Protection and Privacy Act, and for an estate that has been sitting in a European datacentre since 2017 it is usually the part of the migration a board or an auditor is most interested in.
Yes, and you should. Snapshot the source before you touch it and snapshot the new instance after each step of the build. Snapshots and scheduled backups are available on every plan, and rolling back is a click rather than a restore weekend.
They can, from the same account. The same Stream 9 image deploys into ke-1a, tz-1a and ng-1a, so a multi-country estate ends up with one console, one invoice and each country's workload sitting in its own region rather than all of them sharing a machine on another continent.
Yes. Your data is hosted in Uganda and stays in-country, giving you data residency for Uganda's Data Protection and Privacy Act. It isn't moved out of Uganda without your instruction.
In our Kampala data centre (ug-1a). Your content is stored and served from Kampala, close to your users.
Pay in Uganda Shillings using MTN Mobile Money, Airtel Money, bank transfer, or card. No foreign card or forex conversion is required.
You're billed in UGX. Prices can be viewed in USD, KES, TZS, or NGN, but as a Uganda customer you pay in UGX with no forex conversion.
Deploy your CentOS Stream 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 UGX
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Every plan below runs in the same three regions, on the same network, billed the same way.