LINESERVE

Partners in Uganda

Sell Kampala hosting under your own name

Three ways in: resell in ug-1a under your own brand, refer business and earn on what you refer, or build your own product on the platform. Whichever you pick, the wholesale side is denominated in Uganda Shillings and the retail side is yours to set — which is what lets you hand a Kampala client a price list and still recognise the margin on it a year later. The brand in front of them is yours, the invoice is yours, and the relationship never leaves your book. Behind you sit a Kampala region and three more on the same account.

Ways to partner

Find the program that fits you

Reseller partners

White-label hosting and cloud you sell under your own brand. Wholesale pricing, your retail, your margin — with local billing you can pass straight to your clients.

For: agencies, IT firms, web professionals.

Become a reseller

Referral partners

Send business our way and earn on what you refer. No support burden — you make the introduction, we handle delivery.

For: consultants, freelancers, communities.

Join the referral program

Technology partners

Build your product or service on Lineserve, integrate with our platform, and go to market together.

For: ISVs, SaaS builders, systems integrators.

Explore technology partnerships

What you are reselling

A Kampala region, and an argument that only works here

The first question a Ugandan client asks is where the site will actually be, and the answer carries more weight here than in the countries either side. Uganda has no coastline, so international capacity reaches Kampala only after an overland haul from Mombasa through Malaba or Busia, or from Dar es Salaam through Mutukula. A client hosted abroad pays for that haul and then an ocean crossing, on every request, in both directions. Put the same site in ug-1a and both legs disappear — a proposal paragraph nobody selling from Nairobi or Johannesburg can write, and one your client can check with a traceroute while you sit there.

Underneath whatever brand you put on it, what you sell is infrastructure rather than a resold control panel: an API and a CLI, snapshots and scheduled backups, private networking, independent resize up to 32 vCPU and 64 GB, a dedicated IPv4 and a free /64 of IPv6, always-on DDoS mitigation, and a published 99.9% uptime SLA with automatic service credits. The Ugandan field competes hard on price and on bundling a .ug name, and it is right to. Very little of it publishes an SLA, an API or a second region — which is where your proposal can go instead of into a discount.

Money

Your clients pay you from two wallets. You pay in one currency.

Uganda settles from a wallet, and from two of them. MTN Mobile Money and Airtel Money run on the networks carrying more than 90% of Ugandan subscriptions between them, behind 37.8 million active mobile money users. Your clients will pay you from whichever one they hold, and your side of the chain runs on the same methods.

MTN Mobile Money and Airtel Money

Both, rather than one. That is the detail separating a Ugandan checkout from a Kenyan one, and it applies to your business as much as to ours: a reseller who takes a single wallet is asking half their prospects to find another handset. A monthly wholesale line is an ordinary wallet-sized payment in shillings.

Bank transfer

What a growing book actually runs on. A partner carrying twenty client instances, or committing annually at ten months for twelve, writes a transfer rather than pushing a payment from a handset: wallet limits are set by the operator and the account tier, and a serious monthly figure sits above them. Card is there too, in shillings, for a recurring line somebody keeps on file.

The advantage

Built to make partners money, locally

Real margin

Wholesale pricing with room to set your own retail and keep the difference.

White-label

Sell hosting and cloud under your brand, not ours, where it counts.

Local billing

Pay in KES, TZS, or NGN and invoice your clients in the currency they actually use — no forex eating your margin.

One platform

Hosting, cloud servers, storage, and dedicated hardware for every client, from a single relationship.

Local support

Back your clients with a support team in your region and timezone.

Grow without limits

Start with a handful of clients and scale into a full book of business on the same terms.

How it works

From application to earning

1

Apply

Tell us about your business and how you want to partner. We review and get back to you quickly.

2

Onboard

Get set up with wholesale pricing, white-label configuration, and everything you need to sell.

3

Sell & earn

Bring on clients under your brand, bill them locally, and grow your recurring revenue.

Who it's for

Made for the people building the region's web

Web & digital agencies

Bundle hosting and cloud into your client projects.

IT service providers & MSPs

Offer managed infrastructure without building your own.

Consultants & freelancers

Refer clients and earn, or resell under your name.

ISVs & SaaS builders

Run and ship your product on local infrastructure.

Our ecosystem

Built on trusted foundations

Lineserve runs on carrier-neutral, Tier III facilities and local connectivity across the region — the partners whose infrastructure underpins ours. These are suppliers to Lineserve, not resellers.

Three in-country regions

Nairobi (ke-1a), Dar es Salaam (tz-1a) and Lagos (ng-1a) — each in the country it serves, so your client's data sits where their regulator expects to find it.

On the local exchange

KIXP carries 136 peer networks across four Nairobi facilities, and Lineserve peers there — so traffic between your client and another Kenyan network is handed over inside Nairobi rather than in Europe.

Get started

Let's build something together

Tell us how you'd like to partner and we'll take it from there.

Prefer email? Reach us at [email protected].

FAQ

Partnership questions, answered

There's no cost to apply. Reseller partners buy at wholesale rates and set their own retail; referral partners earn on what they refer.

Yes. Reseller partners get white-label hosting and cloud, so your clients see your brand, not ours.

However you like. You pay Lineserve at wholesale in local currency and invoice your clients in the currency and on the terms you choose.

You own the client relationship; we back you with infrastructure support in your timezone. Managed options are available if you want us closer to the front line.

We aim to review applications and respond within two business days.

Yes. Many partners resell some services and refer others. Tell us your model and we'll set it up.

Nothing, either to apply or to keep. Resellers buy at wholesale in shillings and set whatever retail they like; referral partners earn on the business they introduce. Current wholesale terms come from [email protected].

Not unless you want them to. The reseller programme is white-label — your brand sits in front, and the relationship, the pricing and the invoice are yours.

Because your retail price is a promise and your wholesale cost is a variable. A Ugandan client expects a shilling quote that holds, and institutional buyers here contract for years rather than months. If your cost sits in a foreign currency, every exchange-rate move is a margin change on business you closed months ago. Buy at wholesale in UGX and both sides are denominated in the same thing.

However you like — you buy at wholesale, set retail and invoice on your own terms. One piece of Ugandan advice worth taking: accept both wallets. MTN Mobile Money and Airtel Money run on the two networks carrying more than 90% of subscriptions between them, and a checkout that takes one of them is a checkout half your prospects work around.

Three things to [email protected]: your TIN, your registered name as URA holds it, and any purchase-order reference your own system needs. They then appear from the first billing run instead of being reconstructed later.

In ug-1a, our Kampala region, unless you choose otherwise. Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and Lagos sit on the same account, and region is a per-instance choice — so one client can be in Kampala while another runs a standby in Nairobi.

The front line is yours, because the relationship is yours. Behind it, infrastructure support runs by ticket, and a signed-in ticket arrives with the account, region and instance already attached. If you would rather we sat closer to your clients, managed options exist — raise it during onboarding.

That the NGO Bureau has reminded the sector it must register under the Data Protection and Privacy Act, so your client is very likely a registered controller already. Beneficiary records are personal data, and holding them abroad puts a section 19 justification in a file somebody must produce during an audit or a donor review. Held in Kampala, that entry never has to exist. Their registration and notices remain their own work.

As a supplier, in the middle of it. Information technology and communications is one of the twelve sectors URA designated, so your own invoicing sits inside that regime, and a client's ability to claim input VAT on what you sell depends on the document you issue. Settle that with your tax adviser before you build the price list, then ask [email protected] for what you need on the wholesale side.

There is no minimum and no sales target: one client is a perfectly good place to begin, and the terms do not change as the book grows. Annual billing at ten months for twelve is there if you would rather match a client's contract year. Applications are reviewed within two business days. Plenty of partners resell for some clients and refer others — say so on the application and the account is configured for both.

Turn local infrastructure into your advantage

Resell it, refer it, or build on it — under your brand, billed locally, supported in your timezone.

No cost to apply · Local billing · Response within 2 business days

Margin, tax and the document

The margin you signed up for is the margin you keep

A reseller whose wholesale cost is denominated in dollars cannot publish a price list and mean it. Every move in the rate is a margin change on clients you sold to months ago, arriving without warning. Buy in shillings and the arithmetic goes still: your cost per instance is fixed, your retail is a figure you chose, and the difference between them in November is the one you signed up for in March. That is worth more than a discount here, because it is what lets you quote a three-year SACCO contract or a two-year programme without hedging it.

Then the document, which in Uganda reaches you as a supplier and not only as a buyer. VAT is 18%, administered by the Uganda Revenue Authority, whose published list of taxable electronic services begins with the words "web hosting". EFRIS, URA's real-time e-invoicing system, binds every VAT-registered business plus twelve designated sectors regardless of registration — and information technology and communications is one of the twelve. Your own invoices to your clients sit inside that system, and their ability to claim input VAT on what you sell turns on the document they get from you. Settle your side before the first order, and send [email protected] your TIN and registered name.

Withholding, for the partner whose accountant asks first

Uganda replaced its 5% digital services tax on 1 July 2025 with a 15% final withholding tax on income non-residents derive from digital services supplied to users in Uganda, and sections 83 and 84 of the Income Tax Act apply 15% to international payments and to non-resident service contracts, subject to treaty relief. Where your particular arrangement lands is a question for your own adviser — ask [email protected] for whatever supplier details that review needs.

Price the year, not the month

Annual terms run ten months for twelve. For a partner billing clients annually — most agency retainers, most institutional work, and every donor-funded programme — matching the two calendars turns twelve reconciliations into one, and turns your own cash flow into something you can plan around.

Prices exclude VAT; Uganda's 18% is added at checkout. Wholesale terms and invoicing requirements are worth settling with [email protected] before the first order rather than after it.

What you can promise a client

"Your data is in Kampala" is a sentence that ends a procurement thread

Every Ugandan partner selling to a lender, a SACCO, a school platform or a programme office meets the same question, earlier every year: where is the data held. Uganda's Data Protection and Privacy Act, 2019 — Chapter 97 of the Laws of Uganda — is administered by the Personal Data Protection Office, seated within NITA-U. Section 19 lets personal data leave the country only where the destination protects it at least equivalently or the data subject consents, and the Office expects records of the basis, safeguards and justification for each transfer, produced on audit. Host the client in ug-1a and none of that has anything to act on.

Two features make this a stronger card than it looks. The registration duty is written extraterritorially — it binds anyone processing Ugandan citizens' personal data, inside the country or outside it — and the Office enforces it. In July 2025 it decided a complaint against a very large foreign platform on two counts, non-registration and failure to evidence a lawful basis for moving the complainants' data abroad, and ordered registration within thirty days. Your client's compliance team has read about it. Naming the city in the first meeting rather than the third is worth more than any feature comparison beside it.

The region supplies one thing: location. Registration with the Office, its annual renewal, the notices and everything else a controller carries stay with your client, and saying so in the meeting is what makes the rest of your proposal believable.

Who this suits

Seven kinds of Ugandan business this was built for

If you already own the client relationship and watch the hosting revenue leave the country attached to it, this is aimed at you.

Web and digital agencies

Kampala's agency and freelance scene is the densest reseller channel in the country, anchored by hubs like Hive Colab, The Innovation Village and Outbox. Multi-tenant instances, staging environments, CyberPanel or Plesk stacks, Git deploys and client mail, billed to you in shillings and to your client under your own name. Provisioning is API-driven, so a client environment is a script rather than an afternoon.

IT service providers and MSPs

Managed infrastructure for a book of Kampala, Jinja, Mbarara and Gulu clients without buying a rack or hiring a facilities engineer. Backup targets in object storage, a standby in another region, dedicated hardware when a workload outgrows shared compute, one shilling invoice for the lot.

Mobile money and core banking integrators

If you implement collections, disbursement, agent networks, USSD menus, loan management or reconciliation, your clients reconcile against two wallet providers and, in the regulated tiers, sit under Bank of Uganda or Uganda Microfinance Regulatory Authority supervision. Selling the infrastructure beside the integration answers a question their board was going to ask you anyway.

ISPs, WISPs and network operators

Behind the two mobile networks sits a real enterprise layer — Roke Telkom, CSquared's Kampala metro fibre, Liquid, BCS Group, Tangerine, Africell, Paratus — already selling connectivity to businesses that also need somewhere to run things. The systems you operate for yourself belong in Kampala regardless: RADIUS, resolvers, mail relays, billing and provisioning, monitoring, looking glass. Resell what you already buy.

NGO and donor-sector integrators

Kampala carries a large United Nations and international NGO presence with field operations across the north and west, and the NGO Bureau has itself reminded the sector to register under the Data Protection and Privacy Act. A partner building DHIS2 deployments, ODK and KoboToolbox form servers, M&E dashboards or grant accounting can put the hosting inside the country the beneficiaries live in, and bill it against the grant year rather than across it.

ISVs and SaaS builders

Run your product in ug-1a and sell to Ugandan customers without explaining a foreign region in every security review. Per-tenant infrastructure becomes a deployment step, and shilling pricing lets you set plans against what a Ugandan SME will actually pay each month.

Getting started

Moving a book, or starting one

You already resell hosting from abroad

Start with the clients who feel it first: the ones whose users are entirely Ugandan, and the ones whose data would raise a section 19 question the moment somebody asked. Each move is ordinary work — provision, sync, dump and restore, run both for a day, cut the DNS. Run the commercial change alongside it, because that is the half that pays for the afternoon. Your cost stops being a foreign figure shifting under a book you already priced. "Which country is my data in" becomes a one-word answer. And your client's traffic stops crossing a border and an ocean to reach a machine that could have been in the next suburb. Clients genuinely serving users abroad can stay exactly where they are.

Hosting is not what you sell today

A great many Ugandan integrators, agencies and ISPs let the client buy the hosting themselves, then watch a recurring revenue line walk out of the project with it — usually onto a card somebody's director is carrying personally. The way in is narrow rather than wide: one client, one instance, your brand on it, a price you chose. Nothing to apply, no minimum book, and the API, backups, SLA and support are exactly the ones a large partner gets.

The application is short: what your business does, and which of the three models fits it. Reviews take two business days, and onboarding covers wholesale pricing, white-label configuration, invoicing and API access.