ug-1a — Kampala
A country with no coastline, and a region inside it
Every megabit of international capacity Uganda has was carried here overland, because Uganda has no sea and nothing lands in it. Capacity comes inland from the cable stations at Mombasa across Kenya, or north from Dar es Salaam across Tanzania, before it ever reaches Kampala. That is the argument for a Kampala region in one sentence: an application hosted abroad makes its Ugandan users pay for that haul twice on every request, and a server in Kampala skips the whole journey. ug-1a puts compute, storage and the region's network endpoint inside the city, under Ugandan law, with Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and Lagos on the same account for the copy you keep elsewhere.
3
live regions
Tier III
facilities
Carrier-neutral
connectivity
<6 ms
latency within each metro
The footprint
Three metros, on the ground today
Each region is a physically distinct facility with its own power, cooling, connectivity, and network endpoint. Choose where your workloads and data live.
Nairobi
Kenya · ke-1a
~2 ms
typical, within metro
in-country region
Dar es Salaam
Tanzania · tz-1a
~6 ms
typical, within metro
in-country region
Lagos
Nigeria · ng-1a
~4 ms
typical, within metro
in-country region
Network
Uganda is landlocked. Everything else on this map follows from that.
Begin with the sea, because Uganda does not have one. There is no cable landing station in the country. Every bit of international capacity in Kampala crossed a neighbour first — east through Kenya from the Mombasa landings to the border at Malaba or Busia, or south through Tanzania from the Dar es Salaam landings to Mutukula. That is close to a thousand kilometres of terrestrial fibre before a packet reaches salt water. Kenya's inland haul from Mombasa to Nairobi is roughly 480 km inside one country; Uganda's is about twice that and crosses a border to do it.
That used to read as fragility. It now reads as route diversity, and the routes have names. Bayobab built a Kampala–Tororo leg along the Uganda Railway corridor and on through Malaba into Kenya's national long-distance network toward the coast. SEACOM opened a Nairobi–Kisumu–Kampala route with two separate border crossings, at Malaba and Busia, an inland alternative by way of Narok and Kericho, and automatic protection switching on a fault. Roke Telkom and Paratus run a corridor of some 2,000 km linking Goma, Kigali, Kampala, Nairobi and Mombasa. And NITA-U's National Backbone Infrastructure reaches Mutukula, giving the country a southern path toward Dar es Salaam instead of a single dependence on the Kenyan one.
Inside the country, that same backbone is why one origin in Kampala covers Uganda. The NBI links the capital to regional centres and border posts, and UCC put the national fibre optic network at 80,257 km in June 2026, up from 71,740 three months earlier, across 5,663 telecom towers. A user in Gulu, Mbarara, Mbale, Jinja, Arua or Hoima reaches Kampala over domestic fibre rather than an international path. Most Ugandan deployments therefore want one region rather than several.
Then the exchange. UIXP is Uganda's internet exchange point, non-profit, running since 2001, with a layer-2 peering fabric reachable from two interconnected locations in greater Kampala and its switch housed at Communications House in a room provided by the UCC. PeeringDB lists 26 networks on 29 connections there, 380G of connected capacity and 86% IPv6 — Akamai and Meta each on 100G, MTN Uganda on 30G, Liquid, Tangerine and Paratus on 10G, and RENU, the network behind Uganda's universities, on two 10G ports.
And the users, who in Uganda are on a handset. UCC counted 64.6 million registered mobile subscriptions in the quarter to June 2026, 49 million of them active, alongside 19.7 million active mobile internet subscriptions and 20.5 million smartphones. MTN Uganda and Airtel Uganda hold more than nine lines in ten between them, so a Ugandan audience sits on one of two networks. ug-1a is domestic to both at once.
0
Submarine cables landing in Uganda — it has no coastline
380G
Capacity connected at UIXP, Kampala (PeeringDB)
80,257 km
National fibre optic network (UCC, June 2026)
49M
Active mobile subscriptions (UCC, Q2 2026)
Why a local exchange counts for more here
Two networks that meet at an exchange hand traffic straight to each other inside the country, instead of paying an international carrier to take it out and bring it back. The saving is larger in Uganda than in a coastal capital, because the alternative path is longer: without a domestic meeting point, traffic between two Kampala networks travels to Mombasa or Nairobi, or further, and returns.
The gap on the map
No global cloud provider runs a full region in Uganda. Their nearest full regions sit in southern Africa and their nearest edge locations are in Nairobi, which is another country with another border and another regulator. So Ugandan data held with a global provider is, in practice, held outside Uganda. That is a factual position rather than a criticism — those are excellent platforms, and none of them is here.
Check it from a Kampala connection
Traceroute a ug-1a address from your own MTN or Airtel connection and watch where the path terminates, then run the same trace from outside the country and compare. Look the address up and see which networks announce it. It takes a minute, costs nothing, and is worth doing to every provider on your shortlist rather than only to this one.
Facility detail
Inside our regions
Four regions, each in the country it serves. Where each one sits on its national network is what decides how it behaves. Certifications and standards below belong to the facility operator; Lineserve operates within these carrier-neutral, Tier III facilities.
Kampala (ug-1a)
Location
Kampala, Uganda
Facility
Tier III, carrier-neutral
International capacity
Uganda is landlocked, so its international capacity arrives overland — hauled across Kenya from Mombasa or across Tanzania from Dar es Salaam before it reaches Kampala.
Local exchange
UIXP, the Uganda Internet Exchange Point, sits in Kampala and is where Ugandan networks hand traffic to each other rather than sending it out of the country and back.
Data residency
Your data is held in Uganda, giving you data residency for Uganda's Data Protection and Privacy Act.
Storage endpoint
ug-1a.s3.lineserve.net
Nairobi (ke-1a)
Location
Nairobi, Kenya
Facility
Tier III, carrier-neutral
International capacity
Kenya's international capacity comes ashore at Mombasa and is backhauled roughly 480 km inland to Nairobi.
Local exchange
KIXP, operated by TESPOK across four Nairobi facilities, carries 136 peer networks and 2.9 Tbps of capacity. Lineserve peers there, so traffic to another network on the exchange is handed over inside Nairobi.
Data residency
Your data is held in Kenya, giving you data residency for Kenya's Data Protection Act.
Storage endpoint
ke-1a.s3.lineserve.net
Dar es Salaam (tz-1a)
Location
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
Facility
Tier III, carrier-neutral
International capacity
Tanzania's international capacity comes ashore at Dar es Salaam, and the national backbone reaches inland from there.
Local exchange
TIX, the Tanzania Internet Exchange, sits in Dar es Salaam and is where Tanzanian networks hand traffic to each other rather than routing it abroad.
Data residency
Your data is held in Tanzania, giving you data residency for Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act.
Storage endpoint
tz-1a.s3.lineserve.net
Lagos (ng-1a)
Location
Lagos, Nigeria
Facility
Tier III, carrier-neutral
International capacity
Nigeria's international capacity comes ashore at Lagos, which is where the country's subsea systems terminate.
Local exchange
IXPN, the Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria, sits in Lagos and keeps traffic between Nigerian networks inside the country.
Data residency
Your data is held in Nigeria, giving you data residency for Nigeria's Data Protection Act (NDPA).
Storage endpoint
ng-1a.s3.lineserve.net
Built for uptime
The standards behind every region
Our regions operate in facilities engineered for continuous availability — the layers that are expensive and slow to build, already in place.
Tier III facilities
Concurrently maintainable power and cooling, so maintenance never means downtime.
Redundant power
Dual A+B feeds, UPS protection, and generator backup to ride through grid faults.
Resilient cooling
N+1 precision cooling with containment to hold temperature under full load.
Physical security
Access control, CCTV, and staffed, audited entry to every space.
Fire detection & suppression
Early-warning detection and suppression systems protecting the floor.
24/7 monitoring
Power, environmental, and network monitoring around the clock, with on-site response.
Connectivity
Carrier-neutral, close to the cables
Our facilities are carrier-neutral, so you're never locked to a single network. Blended local IP transit keeps latency low and traffic on the continent, with cross-connects to the carriers and peers you need.
Carrier-neutral
Choose among multiple upstreams and peers within the facility.
Local IP transit
Blended, low-latency transit from regional providers, with room to scale.
Subsea cable access
Each region sits where its country's international capacity comes ashore — Mombasa for Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, and Lagos.
Cross-connects & peering
Direct links to carriers, IXPs, and your own cabinets.
Sovereignty
Your data stays on the continent
For regulated, sensitive, or public-sector workloads, jurisdiction matters. Because our facilities are physically in-region, your data can stay in the country you choose — under laws you understand, close to the users it serves.
Talk to Sales about data residencyWhat's next
More regions, zone by zone
We're extending the footprint across the continent, placing infrastructure closer to more users. These zones are in progress.
Put your workloads where your users are
Tier III facilities, redundant everything, and data that stays in-country — with local billing and support.
99.9% uptime SLA · Carrier-neutral · Data stays in-country
Data residency
Choosing a region is choosing a legal system
Round trips are the reason most people give for hosting in Kampala. Jurisdiction is the reason the decision is hard to reverse. Uganda's Data Protection and Privacy Act, 2019 — now Chapter 97 — is the governing statute, the Regulations of 2021 sit beneath it, and the Personal Data Protection Office inside NITA-U administers both. Section 29 requires collectors, processors and controllers to register, and the duty is written to reach entities outside Uganda that handle Ugandan citizens' personal data. In July 2025 the Office applied it to a global technology company with no Ugandan establishment, finding it in breach for failing to register and for failing to evidence a lawful basis for exporting complainants' data.
Section 19 is the clause that decides where a workload sits. Personal data leaves Uganda only where the destination country's protection is at least equivalent to the Act's, or where the data subject consents, and onward transfers need consent too. There is no permit to apply for per transfer. What there is instead is a standing duty to hold records of the legal basis, the safeguards and the justification for every export, available for inspection during an audit, a compliance check or an investigation. Hold the data in ug-1a and there is no export to evidence, because the answer to where the customer data lives is the name of a city your regulator can reach.
The penalties are published
Fines under the Act reach 2% of annual gross turnover for a corporation, alongside imprisonment, and section 23 requires a controller to notify the Office immediately on reasonably believing personal data has been accessed by an unauthorised person, with annual breach reports on top. A regime that publishes numbers like those is one whose questions turn up in bank onboarding and donor audits.
Registration is about you, not the building
What ug-1a supplies is location: your data held in Kampala, under Ugandan law, and moved out of the country only when you move it. Registration with the Office, your lawful basis, your notices and your breach handling remain yours wherever you host — and that distinction is the first thing a competent Ugandan procurement reviewer will test.
Copying personal data about Ugandans into ke-1a, tz-1a or ng-1a is a transfer out of Uganda and belongs in the section 19 record above. Machine images, static assets and logs without personal data raise none of it.
Who chooses a region on purpose
The workloads that decide Kampala first and build around it
For plenty of applications the region is a shrug. For these it is the first constraint, and everything else was fitted around it.
Mobile money and wallet backends
Collections and disbursement endpoints taking callbacks from two operators rather than one, session handlers, reconciliation jobs that have to balance against two wallet providers, KYC stores and audit archives kept for years. The callbacks originate on Ugandan networks and retry on Ugandan networks.
USSD and feature-phone services
UCC's device count is the fact people forget: 24.7 million feature phones and 13.3 million basic phones alongside 20.3 million smartphones. A USSD menu is a chain of short, strictly timed round trips through an operator gateway, and each one pays whatever distance you put in front of it. A mainstream Ugandan workload, not an edge case.
Field data collection and M&E
ODK and KoboToolbox form servers, DHIS2 deployments, offline-tolerant sync for teams that go upcountry for days. A resumable upload from Arua or Kabale repeats a round trip per chunk and again per retry, and over the national backbone it stays domestic for the whole of it.
ISPs, WISPs and network operators
RADIUS and AAA, recursive resolvers and authoritative zones, mail relays, billing and provisioning portals, NetFlow collectors, Zabbix and LibreNMS, looking glass, IPAM, speed-test endpoints. Each is a service to Ugandan networks measured by Ugandan users, which makes hosting it anywhere else actively worse.
Anything holding Ugandan personal data
Member registers, beneficiary registries, patient records, loan books, student files, HR systems. Section 19 asks a question about each of them the moment the data leaves the country, and it asks it again at every audit. Held in Kampala, none of that arises.
Anything replacing a server in the office
Electricity distribution passed from Umeme to UEDCL in April 2025, tariffs sit above UGX 600 a unit, and a Kampala business running a rack in a back room is buying a generator, an inverter and a fuel account to keep it alive. Moving the machine turns that into a fixed shilling line with a 99.9% SLA behind it.
Choosing
How to find out where a server actually is
From a region outside Uganda
The move is routine work: provision, sync, dump and restore the database, run both in parallel for a day, cut the DNS. What changes afterwards is the shape of every request a Ugandan user makes — the path stops crossing two countries and an ocean to arrive, then doing it all again to reply. The commercial side changes with it: quoted and invoiced in Uganda Shillings, so the figure approved in one quarter is the figure billed in the next.
From a Uganda-branded product served from somewhere else
Several products marketed for this country are delivered from Nairobi or from Europe with a Ugandan name on the front and a .ug address in the browser bar. That is a legitimate way to sell hosting, and knowing which one you have bought is your job, because it decides how far your customers' packets travel and whose law your records sit under. One question settles it: which city is the machine in, and will the provider name it? For a Lineserve instance the answer is ug-1a, Kampala.
You can check any of this in a minute. Traceroute from an MTN or Airtel connection and watch where the path terminates, then run it again from outside Uganda and compare. Then ask what the uptime SLA pays when it is missed, and who has to claim it.
FAQ
Questions, answered
In Kampala: compute, storage and the region's network endpoint are all in the city, and an instance stays there unless you move it. Traceroute to it from a Ugandan connection and watch where the path ends, then repeat from outside the country and compare. Put the same test to anything else you are quoted.
None — Uganda is landlocked and has no cable landing station. International capacity arrives overland: from the Mombasa landings across Kenya to Malaba or Busia, or from the Dar es Salaam landings across Tanzania to Mutukula. That is precisely why an in-country origin is worth more here than in a coastal capital.
Less than it once did. There are now several distinct international paths — Bayobab through Malaba, SEACOM with crossings at both Malaba and Busia, the Roke Telkom and Paratus corridor running Goma to Mombasa, and the National Backbone Infrastructure reaching Mutukula toward Dar es Salaam. Diversity is the honest description of the current picture.
Uganda's internet exchange point, non-profit, running since 2001 from two interconnected locations in greater Kampala with its switch at Communications House. PeeringDB lists 26 networks, 29 connections and 380G of capacity there. An exchange lets Ugandan networks hand traffic to each other inside Uganda instead of paying a carrier to route it out of the country and back.
No. The nearest full regions of the large global providers are in southern Africa, and their nearest edge locations are in Nairobi, which is another country. Ugandan data held with a global provider is therefore generally held outside Uganda, and the section 19 question below applies to it.
They reach Kampala over the National Backbone Infrastructure and the wider national fibre network — 80,257 km of it as of June 2026 — rather than over an international path. That is why one origin in Kampala covers upcountry Uganda without a second region.
Mobile ones, overwhelmingly. UCC counted 49 million active mobile subscriptions in the quarter to June 2026 and 19.7 million active mobile internet subscriptions, with MTN Uganda and Airtel Uganda holding more than nine lines in ten between them. Any Ugandan audience is on one of those two, and ug-1a is domestic to both.
Both ends are in the country, and Ugandan networks present at UIXP exchange their traffic in Kampala rather than sending it out and back. The exact path depends on the two networks involved, which is what a traceroute from your own connection will show you in about ten seconds.
Kampala, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and Lagos sit on one account, one API and one bill, with the region chosen per instance, and every instance gets a dedicated IPv4 and a free /64 IPv6 by default. Treat personal data deliberately when you replicate: a copy outside Uganda is a transfer under section 19.
No — registration with the Personal Data Protection Office and the controller obligations belong to you, wherever the server sits. What the region gives you is residency: the data is held in Uganda, under Ugandan law, so there is no cross-border transfer to justify for records that never leave.
Not for data that stays in Uganda — the section 19 record covers exports, and there is no export. If you deliberately copy personal data to another country, including to a standby in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam or Lagos, that is a transfer and it belongs in the file with its legal basis and safeguards written down.
Cloud servers and VPS on Linux or Windows, dedicated servers, and S3-compatible object storage on the ug-1a.s3.lineserve.net endpoint, behind a published 99.9% uptime SLA with always-on DDoS mitigation, snapshots and scheduled backups. Colocation in Kampala is quoted rather than listed — send rack, power and connectivity requirements to [email protected].
Yes. A domain registered under .ug or any of its second-level zones points at a Lineserve instance like any other name: set the A and AAAA records and you are live. The ccTLD has been running since 1995 and registration is open to non-residents as well as Ugandan businesses.
The problem stops being yours to fuel. A server in your own building is kept alive by a generator, an inverter and a diesel account that moves with the pump price; in a region it becomes a fixed shilling line item with a published 99.9% uptime SLA behind it, and status.lineserve.net when you want to know what actually happened.