Managed Databases — launching in Kampala, ug-1a
Coming soonManaged Databases in Uganda
The wallet ledger, the member register, the beneficiary list — held in Kampala, run for you.
Your web tier can live wherever you like. The database is the part holding the phone numbers, the national ID references, the repayment history and the loan book, and it is the thing a partner bank's due diligence asks about by name. Managed PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis and MariaDB are coming to ug-1a in Kampala, with backups, patching, monitoring and failover taken off your team — quoted in shillings from UGX 54,300 a month at launch. Join the waitlist and you will hear the week it opens.
- Launching soon — join the waitlist for early access
- PostgreSQL · MySQL · MongoDB · Redis · MariaDB
- Hosted in Kampala, ug-1a
- Data residency for Uganda's Data Protection and Privacy Act — your data stays in-country
- Quoted and billed in UGX
Launching soon · Billed in UGX
Pricing
One flat price per instance
Pick a size and engine — every plan includes automated backups, point-in-time recovery, and multi-AZ high availability. In your currency, no forex.
Small
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 1 vCPU
- 2 GB RAM
- 20 GB SSD included
- 100 connections
- Daily backups, 35-day PITR
Medium
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 2 vCPU
- 4 GB RAM
- 50 GB SSD included
- 200 connections
- Daily backups, 35-day PITR
Large
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 4 vCPU
- 8 GB RAM
- 100 GB NVMe included
- 500 connections
- Daily backups, 35-day PITR
XLarge
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 8 vCPU
- 16 GB RAM
- 200 GB NVMe included
- 1000 connections
- Daily backups, 35-day PITR
Every plan includes automated backups with 35-day point-in-time recovery, and multi-AZ high availability is available on all sizes. Additional storage is billed per GB. Prices exclude VAT; local currency figures are indicative and settled at checkout.
Where the database sits
Uganda has no coastline, and your ORM does not know that
One page view is not one request. Behind a login screen sits the session lookup, the user row, the permission check, a query per line item because the ORM decided so, a stock check, a write and an audit row. Thirty round trips is an ordinary number for an ordinary page, and each one pays the distance between application and database twice. That is why the database's address is a different decision from the web server's: a page served from Frankfurt is one long journey, but an application in Kampala talking to a database in Frankfurt is thirty of them, in series, before a byte reaches the handset.
In Uganda that distance starts longer than anywhere else in the region. Uganda is landlocked. No cable lands here, so every bit of international capacity reaching Kampala has already been hauled roughly 900 to 1,000 kilometres overland — east across Kenya from the Mombasa landings through Malaba or Busia, or south across Tanzania from Dar es Salaam through Mutukula. A query from Kampala to a European database crosses that haul, then an ocean, then a continent, and makes the whole trip back. Thirty times. A database in ug-1a skips all of it.
The people at the other end are inside the country. The Uganda Communications Commission counted 64.6 million registered mobile subscriptions and 49 million active ones in the quarter to June 2026, with 19.7 million active mobile internet subscriptions over a national fibre network that reached 80,257 route-kilometres. MTN Uganda and Airtel Uganda carry more than nine in ten subscriptions between them, so no single carrier arrangement covers a Ugandan audience — being in Uganda covers both at once. Domestic traffic has somewhere domestic to go, too: UIXP has run as Uganda's exchange point in Kampala since 2001, with 26 participating networks and 380G of connected capacity on PeeringDB, and the state backbone carries a Kampala origin on to Gulu, Mbale, Mbarara, Jinja and Arua over Ugandan fibre.
What Uganda does not have is a hyperscale cloud region. Amazon's African region is Cape Town, Microsoft's are in South Africa, Google's is Johannesburg, and the nearest edge of any of them sits in Nairobi, which is another country. Edge caches an image. It does not hold a loan book. A managed database at launch is a database in Uganda rather than near it.
49M
Active mobile subscriptions in Uganda (UCC, quarter to June 2026)
~900–1,000 km
Overland fibre from the coast before capacity reaches Kampala
380G
Capacity connected at UIXP, Kampala (PeeringDB)
5
Engines at launch — PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, MariaDB
Wallet callbacks start inside Uganda
A collections integration with MTN Mobile Money or Airtel Money, a merchant's payment notifications, a USSD gateway's session traffic — these originate on Ugandan networks and land on your endpoint, which then writes to your database. Uganda recorded 2.55 billion mobile money transactions in a single quarter, so this is not a trickle. Keeping the receiving end in Kampala keeps the whole path domestic.
Reconciling against two wallets, not one
Uganda's mobile money market is a duopoly, and that shows up in the schema before it shows up anywhere else: two sets of transaction identifiers, two callback formats, two settlement rhythms, one ledger that has to agree with both. That reconciliation job is a database workload on a schedule somebody depends on, and it is the query that gets slower every month nobody looks at it.
Payments
It will bill the way the rest of your account bills
Nothing bills until the service opens. When it does, a managed database joins the same Ugandan account, the same shilling invoice and the same payment methods as the compute you already run.
MTN Mobile Money
Uganda counted 37.8 million active mobile money users in the quarter to June 2026, from a registered base of 58.7 million. MTN Mobile Money is one of the two wallets that market runs on and is a supported method on a Ugandan account, in shillings — the shortest route between a decision and a paid monthly line.
Airtel Money
The other half of the market, and the reason a Ugandan page names two wallets rather than one. Airtel Money is supported on the same account in the same currency, with no preference between them, because a Ugandan finance team's wallet is decided by the SIM in the phone.
Bank transfer
The route almost every purchase with an approval behind it takes. Uganda settles high-value transfers through UNISS and batch transfers through the Kampala Automated Clearing House. A production database with a read replica, or a year taken up front, goes as one instruction with one reference your reconciliation picks up.
Card
Visa and Mastercard, charged in shillings — no foreign card, no forex conversion, and no international transaction line for a finance team to query.
Payment methods for Uganda are MTN Mobile Money, Airtel Money, bank transfer and card, all in UGX. Displayed prices exclude VAT; Uganda's 18% is calculated and shown separately at checkout.
The platform
Everything a production database needs
High availability, backups, security, and observability come wired in — so day two looks like day one.
Five engines
PostgreSQL 14–16, MySQL 8.0/8.1, MongoDB 6/7, Redis 6.2/7, and MariaDB 10.11/11 — your choice.
Multi-AZ high availability
Synchronous standbys across zones with automatic failover in under 60 seconds and zero data loss.
Automated backups & PITR
Daily backups plus continuous archiving — restore to any second within the last 35 days.
Read replicas
Add up to five read replicas with sub-second lag to scale reads and offload analytics.
Encryption everywhere
AES-256 encryption at rest and TLS 1.3 in transit, on by default for every instance.
VPC isolation
Private by default — databases live inside your VPC, reachable only from your own services.
Connection pooling
Built-in PgBouncer and ProxySQL keep thousands of client connections efficient and stable.
Performance insights
Slow-query analytics and live metrics surface the queries that need your attention.
Automated patching
Minor versions and security fixes applied during the maintenance window you choose.
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
Web & mobile backends
Managed PostgreSQL or MySQL that scales with you, so your app team never babysits a database.
E-commerce
Read replicas and connection pooling absorb traffic spikes without dropping a single order.
Caching & sessions
Managed Redis with sub-millisecond latency for sessions, queues, and hot data.
Content management
Run WordPress, Drupal, and custom apps on managed MySQL or PostgreSQL, kept patched and backed up.
How it works
From zero to database in three steps
Pick engine & size
Choose your engine, version, and instance size — from Small to XLarge.
Connect
Grab the connection string and connect — private by default, inside your VPC.
We keep it healthy
Backups, patching, failover, and monitoring — all handled, day and night.
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
Managed beats midnight maintenance
Running your own database on a VPS means backups you hope work, manual failovers, and patching at 2 a.m. This is the option where we do all of that for you.
What it will cost
Four sizes in shillings, and what your accountant will want on the document
The launch price list is four instance sizes. Small — 1 vCPU, 2 GB of RAM, 20 GB of SSD, up to 100 connections — opens at UGX 54,300 a month. Medium is 2 vCPU, 4 GB and 50 GB with 200 connections at UGX 109,000. Large is 4 vCPU, 8 GB and 100 GB of NVMe with 500 connections at UGX 217,000, and XLarge is 8 vCPU, 16 GB and 200 GB of NVMe with 1,000 connections at UGX 434,000. Ugandan figures from a Ugandan price list, rather than a dollar rate converted when the page loads, are what makes a twelve-month forecast hold its shape. The figure covers daily automated backups with a 35-day point-in-time recovery window, patching inside a window you choose, encryption at rest and in transit, and connection pooling; high-availability instances replicate across zones behind a 99.99% uptime SLA.
Uganda's paperwork is unusually specific, and it rewards being ready. The standard VAT rate is 18%, administered by the Uganda Revenue Authority, and URA's published list of taxable electronic services opens with web hosting — there is no argument to be had about whether this class of service is in scope. Displayed prices exclude VAT and the 18% is calculated and shown separately at checkout, so the figure in your budget line and the figure on the quotation match. Uganda's invoicing regime is EFRIS, and it carries a consequence a Ugandan finance manager already knows: 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. Bring your requirements to the waitlist conversation rather than to the first billing run.
Send four things before you order
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 code 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.
Raise the withholding question at account opening
Uganda repealed its 5% digital services tax on 1 July 2025 and replaced it with a 15% withholding tax on non-residents' income from digital services supplied to users in Uganda, 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. A Ugandan corporate buyer's adviser will want to look at that before the first invoice rather than after the fourth.
Prices exclude VAT and are indicative launch pricing rather than an amount payable today. Annual billing runs ten months for twelve on eligible plans — ask [email protected] for a written quotation against your budget cycle.
Data residency
Uganda has already asked a foreign company where the data went
The Data Protection and Privacy Act, 2019 — now Chapter 97 of the Laws of Uganda — is enforced by the Personal Data Protection Office, which sits within NITA-U and has been operational since August 2021. Section 29 and the 2021 Regulations require every data collector, processor and controller to register, and the duty is written to reach beyond the border: it binds entities in Uganda and entities outside Uganda collecting or processing the personal data of Ugandan citizens. Registration runs a year at a time.
That is not a dormant provision. On 18 July 2025 the PDPO decided a complaint against a foreign company with no Ugandan establishment and found it in breach on two counts: it had not registered, and it could not evidence a lawful basis or a compliance framework for transferring the complainants' personal data out of Uganda. It was ordered to register within thirty days and to produce a compliant transfer framework. The office then clarified that the obligations attach to any entity handling Ugandan citizens' personal data, not only to those physically present, and apply until a specific exemption is gazetted.
Section 19 is the other half. Personal data may leave Uganda 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. There is no per-transfer permit here — but you are expected to hold records of the legal basis, the safeguards and the justification for every cross-border transfer, available for inspection during an audit or an investigation, and practitioners are blunt that pointing at a global privacy policy will not do. Penalties reach 245 currency points or 2% of annual gross turnover for a corporation.
Now consider which system that paperwork is actually about. Not the CDN. Not the build pipeline. The database — the rows carrying a national ID reference, a phone number, a balance and a repayment date. Hold it in ug-1a and the data is in Kampala, under Ugandan law, and the section 19 burden does not arise for what is on it. That is data residency for Uganda's Data Protection and Privacy Act. Registration, your records of processing and your own assessments stay with you as controller, and they are a materially shorter pile of work when the personal data never left.
Supervised financial institutions have a second reader
The Bank of Uganda's Cyber and Technology Risk Management Guidelines have bound supervised financial institutions since 1 December 2024, with penalties reaching 2% of gross earnings, and they put infrastructure governance inside the supervisory conversation. If you are licensed, the question of which country your core data sits in arrives through supervision and partner due diligence long before it arrives through the PDPO.
A standby in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam or Lagos is a transfer
ke-1a, tz-1a and ng-1a are one API call away on the same account, which makes a replica easy to place carelessly. A copy of Ugandan personal data in another country engages section 19 and needs the record that goes with it. Schema migrations, container images and logs stripped of identifiers raise no such question — draw that line deliberately rather than by default.
Who runs here
The Ugandan databases that belong in Kampala
Every one of these is a workload where the data is the regulated part and the schema is somebody's whole business — and where nobody can spare an engineer for backups that have never been restored.
Fintech and the wallet ecosystem
The anchor sector: roughly two hundred Ugandan fintech startups sitting on top of 37.8 million active mobile money users. The database underneath one is unmistakable — a loan book that must reconcile exactly, a KYC document index, credit scoring over alternative data, and callback receivers taking collections traffic from two operators rather than one. Managed PostgreSQL takes the backups, patching and failover off a team that would rather spend those hours on scoring. A Medium instance at UGX 109,000 is where most lending backends start.
SACCOs and Tier 4 microfinance
Uganda's regulatory stack is its own. The Bank of Uganda supervises Tiers 1 to 3; the Uganda Microfinance Regulatory Authority licenses Tier 4 under the Tier 4 Microfinance Institutions and Money Lenders Act, 2016 — SACCOs, non-deposit-taking MFIs and moneylenders. The workload is core banking, a member portal, USSD and agent backends, and a month-end and dividend run that wants real capacity for three days and ordinary capacity for twenty-seven. Read replicas absorb the statement run without touching the primary the tellers are on.
NGOs, donor programmes and beneficiary data
Structurally heavy in Uganda's buyer mix, and the cleanest link on this page between a sector and a statute: the NGO Bureau has itself reminded NGOs that they must register under the Data Protection and Privacy Act. Behind a DHIS2 instance, an ODK form server or a beneficiary registry is a database of named people held by a registered controller, with a section 19 question the moment it sits abroad.
Oil, gas and the Albertine contractor economy
The hosting buyers here are not the international operators — they are the Ugandan service contractors, logistics firms, HSE consultancies and local-content suppliers working Hoima, Buliisa and Kikuube and headquartered in Kampala. Contractor and local-content management systems, incident reporting, tender portals, document control, telematics ingest from vehicle fleets. Remote sites push to Kampala over constrained links, which is exactly where an in-country origin beats a European one.
ISPs, telcos and network operators
Two large mobile networks, a set of enterprise carriers and wholesalers — Roke Telkom, CSquared, Liquid, BCS Group, Tangerine, Paratus — a research network in RENU, and a state backbone operator. RADIUS and AAA back-ends, DNS zone stores, billing and provisioning, NetFlow collectors, IPAM. These databases are meaningless outside the country they serve, and the people running them will read a traceroute before they read a page like this one, which is the correct order.
Agencies, ISVs and the .ug long tail
Kampala's agency and freelance developer scene is the reseller channel in this market — one buyer, many client sites, with hubs like Hive Colab, The Innovation Village and Outbox feeding the pipeline. The pattern at launch is one managed database per client rather than one shared MySQL nobody dares upgrade. Small instances at UGX 54,300, several of them, is the shape.
Customer references are available under NDA — ask [email protected] and the team will arrange one against the sector you are buying for.
Migrating
What moving to this will look like at launch
From a database you run yourself on a VPS
Where most Ugandan teams are starting, and the data has the shortest distance to travel: it is already in Kampala. What changes is who carries the pager. Daily backups with a 35-day recovery window instead of a cron job somebody wrote two years ago and nobody has restored from. Patching inside a window you choose instead of a Saturday. Automatic failover across zones instead of a manual promotion at 02:00 with the CTO on the phone. The data path is a dump and restore, or logical replication where the downtime budget is tight, and migration planning is included at no extra charge.
From a managed database in Europe
The mechanics are ordinary — seed the instance, let replication catch up, cut over in your quietest hour, keep the old one read-only for a week. What changes afterwards is larger than the server. Your application stops making thirty round trips that each cross a thousand kilometres of overland fibre and an ocean before they start. Your bill stops moving with the exchange rate and becomes one shilling figure you can put in a budget. And the question a partner bank's vendor review keeps asking gets a one-line answer: the database is in Kampala, under Ugandan law.
One question settles where a database really is, and it is worth putting to every provider you shortlist, this one included: in which country is the machine? For ug-1a the answer is Uganda.
FAQ
Questions, answered
We run the database engine for you — provisioning, backups, patching, monitoring, and failover. You create an instance, get a connection string, and focus on your application.
PostgreSQL 14–16, MySQL 8.0 and 8.1, MongoDB 6.0 and 7.0, Redis 6.2 and 7.0, and MariaDB 10.11 and 11.0 — all with the same managed features.
HA instances replicate across availability zones. If the primary fails, an automatic failover promotes the standby — typically in under 60 seconds, with zero data loss — behind a 99.99% uptime SLA.
Daily automated backups are retained for 35 days with point-in-time recovery to any second in that window. You can also take manual snapshots whenever you like.
Up to five read-only copies of your primary that serve read queries, synced automatically with typically under a second of lag. Use them to scale read-heavy workloads without touching the primary.
Yes. Scale vertically to a larger size within a brief maintenance window, or horizontally by adding read replicas with no downtime at all.
Yes. AES-256 at rest and TLS 1.3 in transit, with platform-managed keys or your own via KMS.
Instances live in a private network with no public access by default. Reach them through security groups and database users, or peer your VPC and connect over VPN from on-premises.
Standard tools work directly — pg_dump and mysqldump for one-shot moves, or logical and binary-log replication for near-zero-downtime migrations. Our team helps plan the move at no charge.
The service is in build and not open for orders. Rather than publish a date that moves, we tell the waitlist directly — email [email protected] with the engine and the size you have in mind and you will hear when the first release is ready.
Not yet — there is no orderable instance. What you can do is size the workload with us, get launch pricing in writing against your account, and be in the first group given access when it opens. Teams with a migration to plan get the most out of starting early.
In ug-1a, our Kampala region. The instance and its storage are created there and stay there unless you move them yourself.
The launch price list runs from UGX 54,300 a month for Small (1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 20 GB SSD, 100 connections) through UGX 109,000 for Medium and UGX 217,000 for Large to UGX 434,000 for XLarge (8 vCPU, 16 GB RAM, 200 GB NVMe, 1,000 connections). Prices exclude VAT.
No. Those figures are indicative launch pricing, and nothing bills until the service opens. If your budget cycle needs a number sooner, ask [email protected] for a written quotation.
In Uganda Shillings, by MTN Mobile Money, Airtel Money, bank transfer or card — the same methods as the rest of your Ugandan account, with no foreign card and no forex conversion required.
No. Displayed prices exclude VAT. Uganda's standard rate is 18%, administered by the Uganda Revenue Authority, whose published list of taxable electronic services names web hosting explicitly. It is calculated and shown separately at checkout.
Daily automated backups retained for 35 days with point-in-time recovery inside that window, plus manual snapshots whenever you want one. Restoring one somewhere harmless on a quiet Tuesday is the exercise worth doing in the first month rather than the first incident.
High-availability instances replicate across availability zones, and a failed primary is replaced by an automatic promotion of the standby, behind a 99.99% uptime SLA.
Yes. Data in ug-1a is held in Kampala and is not moved out of the country without your instruction, which gives you data residency for Uganda's Data Protection and Privacy Act.
It gives you the location, and the location is the part a hosting provider supplies. Registration with the Personal Data Protection Office, your records of processing and your own assessments stay with you as controller. They are a shorter piece of work when the personal data never left Uganda — particularly the section 19 records the PDPO expects to see on an audit.
Yes, on the same account and API. Treat personal data deliberately when you do: a copy of Ugandan personal data in ke-1a, tz-1a or ng-1a is a transfer out of Uganda and engages section 19, including the record of its legal basis and safeguards. Application images, schema migrations and de-identified logs raise no such question.
Yes, at no extra charge, and the planning is better done before launch than after. Standard tools work directly — pg_dump and mysqldump for a one-shot move, logical or binary-log replication where you cannot afford the downtime. Send the engine, the size and where it runs today to [email protected].
Email [email protected] or use the contact form, with the engine, the rough size and what the database holds. No card, no commitment — it puts you in the first group given access and gets launch pricing written against your account.
Production databases, minus the ops
Managed Databases 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 UGX