Pricing — Uganda
Server pricing in Uganda, quoted in shillings
Two things decide most Ugandan infrastructure purchases and the sticker price is only one of them. The other is what your finance function has to do at the year end with a document that was never built for the Ugandan tax system — in a country where URA's published list of taxable electronic services opens with the words "web hosting" and where a VAT credit is rejected if the purchase behind it is not supported by an e-invoice. Every figure on this page is a shilling figure. Cloud servers start at UGX 51,750 a month, a Linux VPS at UGX 81,750, dedicated hardware at UGX 1,151,000. Below the numbers is the part most hosting quotes here leave out: the 18%, the TIN, EFRIS, and the withholding question your CFO will ask before your engineer has finished reading the specs.
No credit card required to start · Prices exclude VAT · Local figures indicative, settled at checkout
Cloud Servers
Build your own VM, from $13.89
No fixed plans — a server is the sum of the vCPU, RAM, SSD and IPv4s you pick. Linux images are free; Windows Server adds a license fee. IPv6 is free and on by default.
| Resource | Unit | Price /mo |
|---|---|---|
| vCPU | per vCPU | UGX 16,150 |
| RAM | per GB | UGX 11,400 |
| Storage — Universal SSD | per GB | UGX 930 |
| Public IPv4 | per address | UGX 5,600 |
| Windows Server 2019 Standard | per server | From UGX 29,800 |
| Windows Server 2022 Standard | per server | From UGX 37,200 |
| Windows Server 2025 Standard | per server | From UGX 44,800 |
| Bandwidth | 1 Gbps port, unlimited local traffic | Free |
| IPv6 (/64) | per server | Free |
Minimum storage: 20 GB for Linux images, 32 GB for Windows. The Windows Server license scales with server size.
Dedicated Servers
Single-tenant bare metal, from $309
The whole machine, nothing shared. Ready configurations online in hours, or a custom build to spec.
| Config | Price /mo | Setup (one-time) | CPU | RAM | Storage |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LineServe Core 1 | UGX 1,151,000 | UGX 369,000 | 16c / 32t | 32 GB | 2 × 480 GB SSD |
| LineServe Core 2 | UGX 1,412,000 | UGX 369,000 | 24c / 48t | 64 GB | 2 × 960 GB SSD |
| LineServe Core 3Popular | UGX 1,971,000 | UGX 555,000 | 32c / 64t | 128 GB | 2 × 1.92 TB SSD |
| LineServe Core 4 | UGX 2,902,000 | UGX 555,000 | 36c / 72t | 256 GB | 2 × 3.84 TB SSD |
| LineServe Core 5 | UGX 3,833,000 | UGX 741,000 | 40c / 80t | 512 GB | 2 × 7.68 TB SSD |
| LineServe Core 6 | UGX 4,839,000 | UGX 741,000 | 44c / 88t | 1 TB | 2 × 15.36 TB SSD |
| Custom | Quote | Quoted | Your spec | Your spec | Your spec |
Object Storage
S3-compatible, from $0.035/GB
Tiered pricing that gets cheaper as you store more — with free egress up to your stored volume each month. No surprise transfer bills.
| Storage tier | Monthly volume | Price / GB / month |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | Up to 1 TB | UGX 228.16 / GB |
| Growth | Up to 5 TB | UGX 195.56 / GB |
| Business | Up to 10 TB | UGX 162.97 / GB |
| Enterprise | 10 TB+ | UGX 130.38 / GB · custom quote |
| Metric | Price |
|---|---|
| Data transfer out | Free |
| Data transfer in | Free |
| Requests | Free |
Colocation
Tier III space, from $100/U
Your hardware in our carrier-neutral facilities, with redundant power and connectivity. Standard commitment terms.
| Option | Price /mo | Space | Power |
|---|---|---|---|
| Single U | UGX 373,000 | 1U | 1A / 120 W |
| Quarter rack | UGX 3,725,000 | 10U | 500 W |
| Half rackPopular | UGX 7,823,000 | 21U | 1 kW, A+B |
| Full rack | UGX 15,645,000 | 42U | 3 kW, A+B |
| Private cage | Quote | Custom | Custom |
Power above your footprint's allowance is UGX 1,863,000 per kW per month.
Always included
No nickel-and-diming
These come standard on every plan, at no extra cost.
How billing works
Simple, local, predictable
How you're charged, and what to expect on the invoice.
Pay in UGX
Settle by MTN Mobile Money, Airtel Money, bank transfer, or card. Billed in UGX, with no forex conversion on your side.
No card to start
Begin without a credit card. Add whatever payment method suits you.
Annual billing — 2 months free
Pay for 10 months, get 12, on eligible plans.
VAT shown separately
Prices exclude VAT; applicable tax is added at checkout.
FAQ
Billing questions, answered
Instances are billed monthly. Changes mid-cycle are prorated, so you only pay for what you use after a resize.
No. You can start without a card — add whatever payment method suits you when you're ready.
No. Displayed prices exclude VAT. Applicable tax is calculated and shown at checkout based on your location.
Pay annually on eligible plans and get two months free — you pay for 10 months and get 12.
Egress is free. Data transfer in and out — and API requests — are all included at no charge, so you only ever pay for the storage you use.
Yes — for dedicated servers, colocation, large deployments, and volume commitments. Talk to Sales for a tailored quote.
Uganda Shillings. You are quoted, invoiced and settled in UGX. Prices can be viewed in USD, KES, TZS, NGN or UGX, but a Ugandan customer transacts in shillings from first quote to final invoice.
A cloud server built from 1 vCPU, 1 GB of RAM, 20 GB of SSD and one IPv4 is UGX 51,750 a month and deploys in under 60 seconds. The smallest fixed Linux VPS plan — 1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 40 GB NVMe — is UGX 81,750.
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.
Yes, and it says so directly. URA's published list of electronic services in scope opens with "web hosting", ahead of software, streaming services, online advertising, remote maintenance and access to databases. Very few categories are named that plainly in any tax authority's guidance.
By the customer's residential or postal address, their internet address, their phone number, or the location of the financial institution making the payment. Any one of those places the supply in Uganda for VAT purposes.
VAT-registered Ugandan businesses are outside the non-resident charging rule and account for the VAT on imported services themselves. Whether that reverse-charged VAT is recoverable in your particular circumstances is a question for your Ugandan tax adviser, and it is worth asking at the order rather than at the year end — it is the piece most buyers find out about late.
EFRIS is URA's real-time Electronic Fiscal Receipting and Invoicing Solution. It binds every VAT-registered business and twelve designated sectors whether VAT-registered or not — information technology and communications among them, along with manufacturing, construction, transport, professional services, accommodation and food, real estate and others. If you sell inside any of those, you are within the perimeter for your own invoicing.
A Fiscal Document Number, an invoice identification number, a verification code and a QR code, alongside the seller's details, the buyer's identifier — TIN, business registration number or national ID — the goods or services, and the tax. URA lists claiming a VAT credit on purchases not supported by an e-invoice as non-compliance it rejects, which is why Ugandan buyers check the document rather than assuming it.
Your TIN, your registered name exactly as URA holds it, a billing email that reaches finance, and any purchase-order or cost-centre reference. Send them to [email protected] and the billing account is configured once rather than corrected later.
Ask your tax adviser about your specific purchase. Two regimes are relevant in Uganda: a 15% final withholding tax, in force since 1 July 2025, on income non-residents derive from digital services supplied to users in Uganda; and sections 83 and 84 of the Income Tax Act, which apply 15% on the gross to international payments and to Ugandan-source service contracts with non-residents, subject to treaty relief. Ask [email protected] for whatever documentation the review needs.
MTN Mobile Money, Airtel Money, bank transfer or card — all in shillings, all settled inside Uganda. Mobile money suits a monthly plan; a bank transfer suits a dedicated server or a year taken up front, which will usually exceed a wallet limit.
Ten months for twelve on eligible plans. A UGX 310,000 VPS is UGX 3,100,000 for the year rather than UGX 3,720,000 — and, for a budget-cycle or grant-funded buyer, one approval and one invoice instead of twelve.
No. Every plan includes a 1 Gbps port with unlimited local traffic, and object storage transfer in, transfer out and API requests are free. There is no per-gigabyte line to model and no overage after a busy month.
LineServe Core hardware runs from UGX 1,151,000 a month for 16 cores, 32 GB of RAM and 2 × 480 GB SSD in RAID-1, through UGX 1,412,000, UGX 1,971,000, UGX 2,902,000 and UGX 3,833,000, to UGX 4,839,000 for 44 cores and 1 TB of RAM. Each carries a one-time setup fee from UGX 369,000 to UGX 741,000, and anything larger is built and quoted to spec.
About UGX 228.16 per GB a month up to 1 TB, UGX 195.56 up to 5 TB and UGX 162.97 up to 10 TB, with transfer in, transfer out and API requests free. Volumes above 10 TB are quoted, and the exact figures are confirmed on your quote.
It is quoted per footprint, because cabinet space, power draw and cross-connects decide the number rather than a list price. Tell [email protected] how many rack units and how much power you need and you will get a written quotation.
Not in Uganda. Managed Kubernetes, managed databases, block storage, file storage and load balancers are marked as launching rather than sold, and carry no Ugandan price. Cloud servers, VPS, dedicated hardware, object storage and colocation are what is available in ug-1a today.
Yes, and it is the cheapest way to buy. Cloud servers are priced by the resource — UGX 16,150 a vCPU, UGX 11,400 a GB of RAM, UGX 930 a GB of SSD — and vCPU, RAM and storage each resize independently up to 32 vCPU and 128 GB of RAM. Size for the traffic you have and add a dimension when the traffic arrives.
Start for $5, scale to a full rack
One platform, one bill, one support team — priced in your currency and built for where you are.
No credit card required · 99.9% uptime SLA · Billed in UGX
Payments
How a Ugandan business actually settles this
Uganda pays from a wallet, and it pays from two of them. The UCC counted 37.8 million active mobile money users in the quarter ending June 2026, moving 2.55 billion transactions in three months, split across MTN Mobile Money and Airtel Money on the two networks that carry more than 90% of subscriptions between them. All four rails are available here — MTN Mobile Money, Airtel Money, bank transfer and card — and each of them settles a shilling amount inside Uganda. What decides which one you use is usually the size of the number.
Mobile money, for the monthly purchase
A UGX 51,750 cloud server, a UGX 81,750 Linux VPS or a UGX 195,000 Windows plan is an ordinary wallet payment on either network, authorised with a PIN on your own handset. No card, no bank onboarding, no forex conversation with anybody.
Bank transfer, for the large one
Wallet limits are set by your operator and your account tier, and a LineServe Core 1 at UGX 1,151,000 plus its UGX 369,000 setup fee, or a year taken up front, will usually sit above them. That is what UNISS and the Kampala Automated Clearing House are for. One transfer, one reference, one line your reconciliation recognises.
Card, for the finance team that prefers one
Visa and Mastercard, charged in shillings, for organisations that would rather keep a card on file than raise a payment instruction every thirty days. A virtual Mastercard issued through MTN MoMo also lets a subscriber without a bank card clear a card-only checkout, which matters more in Uganda than it would elsewhere.
Annual billing, for the approval you only want once
Ten months for twelve on eligible plans. A UGX 310,000 VPS becomes UGX 3,100,000 for the year instead of UGX 3,720,000, and — more usefully for a grant-funded or budget-cycle buyer — it becomes one approval, one payment and one document for the file rather than twelve of each.
In shillings, from first quote to final invoice
You are quoted in UGX, invoiced in UGX and you settle in UGX, so the figure your finance lead approved in March is the figure that clears in November. Nothing converts at the moment you click, no card issuer takes a margin on the way through, and no international transaction appears on the statement to be explained at month end.
Ask [email protected] for transfer details before your payment run rather than during it, and for a formal quotation if procurement needs one against a purchase order. You can start without a payment method on file and add one later.
Tax & invoicing
18%, EFRIS, and the document that decides the claim
Uganda's standard VAT rate is 18%, administered by the Uganda Revenue Authority, and the registration threshold is UGX 150 million of annual taxable turnover. Hosting is not a borderline category here. URA's published list of taxable electronic services begins with the words "web hosting", ahead of software, streaming, online advertising, remote maintenance and access to databases — the first item on the list. Since 1 July 2021 a non-resident supplying those services to a non-taxable person in Uganda charges the 18% and remits it, filing quarterly, with URA determining that a customer is in Uganda from their residential or postal address, their internet address, their phone number or the location of the bank making the payment. A VAT-registered Ugandan business sits outside that charging rule and accounts for the tax itself under the reverse charge. Prices on this page exclude VAT, and the 18% is calculated and shown separately at checkout, so the figure in your budget line and the figure on the quote are the same figure.
The rate is the easy half. EFRIS is the half that decides whether the money comes back. URA's Electronic Fiscal Receipting and Invoicing Solution records transactions and shares them with the authority in real time, and it binds all VAT-registered businesses plus twelve designated sectors whether registered or not — information technology and communications, manufacturing, mining, water, electricity, construction, transport, accommodation and food, real estate, professional services, arts and entertainment, and fuel. If you are reading this page from an IT or communications business in Uganda, you are inside that perimeter for your own sales.
An EFRIS document carries four things a plain PDF does not: a Fiscal Document Number, an invoice identification number, a verification code and a QR code. It identifies the buyer by TIN, business registration number or national identification number, alongside the seller's details, the goods or services and the tax. And URA lists, among the non-compliance it rejects, "claiming a VAT credit by a taxable person on purchases not supported by e-invoices". Read that from the buyer's chair rather than the supplier's and it says something blunt: in Uganda, the shape of the document decides whether the input VAT on a purchase is claimable at all.
Which is why a Ugandan finance manager comparing a supplier abroad against one that transacts inside the Ugandan system is not expressing a preference. They are asking a question with a number attached, and the number is 18% of everything they spend on infrastructure. Put your particular purchase in front of your tax adviser at the order — not in April — and ask them the same question about the reverse charge on imported services, which is the piece most buyers discover late.
Four things, 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 or cost-centre reference that has to appear on the document. Send them to [email protected] before you order and the billing account is configured once instead of amended after the fact. If you are buying against a grant line or an annual budget, ask for the annual invoice in the same message.
Withholding, in a country that changed the rule recently
Uganda repealed its 5% digital services tax on 1 July 2025 and replaced it with a 15% withholding tax on income non-residents derive from digital services supplied to users in Uganda — a final tax, discharging the non-resident's Ugandan income tax obligation on that income. Separately, sections 83 and 84 of the Income Tax Act apply 15% on the gross to international payments including management charges, and to payments under Ugandan-source service contracts with non-residents, subject to treaty relief. Ask your adviser which of those touches your purchase, and ask [email protected] for whatever documentation that review needs.
What the sticker price does not include
VAT at 18%, added at checkout and shown on its own line. The one-time setup fee on dedicated hardware, from UGX 369,000. Snapshot storage beyond the included allowance, billed per GB. Windows licensing where you are building a cloud server rather than buying a Windows VPS plan that already includes it. Everything else on this page — the port, local traffic, DDoS filtering, IPv6, the API, migration assistance — is in the number.
Prices exclude VAT. Colocation is quoted per footprint and object storage figures are confirmed on your quote. Talk to [email protected] about invoicing requirements before you order: it is a five-minute conversation at the start and a considerably longer one at the year end.
Data residency
The line item you do not pay, and the file you do not keep
There is no residency surcharge on this page. Hosting in ug-1a costs what hosting costs, and your data is held in Kampala because that is where the machine is. What that changes is elsewhere in the budget.
Uganda's Data Protection and Privacy Act, 2019 — Chapter 97 — requires data collectors, processors and controllers to register with the Personal Data Protection Office, annually, and the duty reaches entities outside Uganda that handle Ugandan citizens' personal data. Section 19 permits personal data to leave the country only where the destination offers protection at least equivalent to the Act, or where the data subject has consented. Uganda does not run a per-transfer permit regime — but the Office expects records of the legal basis, the safeguards and the justification for every cross-border transfer, produced on demand during an audit, a compliance check or an investigation. Penalties under the Act reach 245 currency points or up to 2% of annual gross turnover for a corporation.
None of that is a hosting invoice, and all of it is a cost. It is counsel time, a register to maintain, an artefact to produce when somebody asks, and a risk carried on a balance sheet. Data that stays in Kampala generates none of it. That is data residency for Uganda's Data Protection and Privacy Act, and it is the part of the price comparison that never appears in a price comparison.
A second region is a decision with a paperwork cost
Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and Lagos sit on the same account, the same API and the same shilling invoice, which makes standby and disaster recovery a configuration rather than a second supplier. Just make the call deliberately: a copy of Ugandans' personal data in another region is a transfer out of Uganda and belongs in the section 19 record. Application images, build artefacts and non-personal telemetry raise no such question and are the cheapest thing in the world to replicate.
What you are not billed for
Why local traffic is priced at zero here of all places
Every plan carries a 1 Gbps port with unlimited local traffic, and on object storage transfer in, transfer out and API requests are all free. There is no per-gigabyte line to model, no overage after a busy harvest month, and no reason to put a cache in front of your own application purely to keep a bill down.
That decision means more in Uganda than it does in a coastal market, because of what bandwidth costs a landlocked country. Uganda has no cable landing station, so every megabit of international capacity is bought twice over: once at the coast, and again as transit across Kenya from Mombasa or across Tanzania from Dar es Salaam before it reaches Kampala. That structural surcharge is why Ugandan bandwidth has historically been among the most expensive in the region, and why Uganda has formally asked for international support to bring the cost of capacity down for landlocked countries. Bandwidth is the input that is genuinely scarce here — which makes metering it the easiest way for a supplier to turn your growth into their revenue.
Traffic that stays inside Uganda never paid that surcharge in the first place. UIXP, the Kampala exchange, has run since 2001 and carries 26 participating networks and 380G of connected capacity on PeeringDB, from two interconnected locations in the greater Kampala area. The UCC put the national fibre network at 80,257 km in June 2026. Domestic traffic is domestic infrastructure, and it should not appear on an invoice as though it had crossed an ocean. So it does not.
UGX 51,750
Smallest cloud server, per month, excluding VAT
UGX 81,750
Linux VPS, entry plan, per month
0
Charge for local traffic, on every plan
10 / 12
Annual billing — pay ten months, get twelve
Build the machine, not the plan
Cloud servers are priced by the resource, per month: UGX 16,150 per vCPU, UGX 11,400 per GB of RAM, UGX 930 per GB of Universal SSD and UGX 5,600 per public IPv4, with a /64 of IPv6 free. The smallest real Linux server — 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 20 GB SSD and one IPv4 — is UGX 51,750 a month. Bounds run to 32 vCPU, 128 GB of RAM and 16 TB of storage, and each dimension resizes on its own, so growth is one line on next month's invoice rather than a new plan and a migration.
Fixed plans, Linux and Windows
Linux VPS: UGX 81,750, UGX 158,000, UGX 310,000, UGX 615,000, UGX 1,224,000 and UGX 2,443,000 a month, from 1 vCPU and 2 GB up to 32 vCPU and 64 GB. Windows VPS with an activated Windows Server 2022 Standard licence in the price: UGX 119,000, UGX 195,000, UGX 348,000, UGX 689,000, UGX 1,373,000 and UGX 2,741,000. Licences are also sold per vCPU on a minimum of four cores — from UGX 29,800 a server for Server 2019, UGX 37,200 for 2022 and UGX 44,800 for 2025. Linux images cost nothing.
Dedicated hardware, storage and rack space
LineServe Core dedicated servers run from UGX 1,151,000 a month for 16 cores and 32 GB, through UGX 1,412,000, UGX 1,971,000, UGX 2,902,000 and UGX 3,833,000, to UGX 4,839,000 for 44 cores and 1 TB of RAM — each with a one-time setup fee from UGX 369,000 to UGX 741,000, and anything larger built and quoted to spec. S3-compatible object storage is about UGX 228.16 per GB per month up to 1 TB, UGX 195.56 up to 5 TB and UGX 162.97 up to 10 TB, with transfer and requests free and larger volumes quoted. Colocation in Kampala is quoted per footprint, because cabinet space and power draw decide the number. Managed Kubernetes, managed databases, block storage, file storage and load balancers are on the waitlist and carry no Ugandan price yet.
Object storage figures are confirmed on your quote. All prices exclude VAT; Uganda's 18% is calculated and shown at checkout.
What it costs to run
Real Ugandan workloads, at the price they actually land at
A .ug business site or brochure with a mail relay
A UGX 81,750 Linux VPS — 1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 40 GB NVMe — carries a WordPress or Laravel site, a small database and a mail relay comfortably, with a dedicated IPv4 and a /64 of IPv6 in the price. Taken annually that is UGX 817,500 for the year. Most Ugandan small businesses never need the next size up.
A mobile money or USSD backend
Collections endpoints taking callbacks from MTN and Airtel, a USSD gateway backend and a reconciliation job usually start on UGX 158,000 or UGX 310,000 and grow a dimension at a time rather than a plan at a time. Unlimited local traffic matters here: this is a workload made of thousands of tiny requests, and metering them by the gigabyte would be a tax on doing business at all.
A SACCO or Tier 4 core system
Member portals and agent-banking frontends run on a UGX 615,000 or UGX 1,224,000 VPS. When month-end and dividend runs stop sharing well with everything else, a LineServe Core 1 at UGX 1,151,000 a month plus a one-time UGX 369,000 gives the batch its own 16 cores and 32 GB, on RAID-1 SSD with out-of-band access.
An NGO monitoring and evaluation platform
DHIS2, ODK or KoboToolbox form servers with a donor dashboard in front typically land between UGX 158,000 and UGX 615,000, depending on how many field teams are submitting. Annual billing at ten months for twelve lines up with the grant year, produces one invoice for the file, and takes one approval instead of twelve.
An agency running client sites
Several UGX 81,750 or UGX 158,000 instances, or one UGX 615,000 machine partitioned with CyberPanel or Plesk, plus a staging box. The economics of this segment are per-client-per-month, so a shilling price list and no bandwidth line are what make the margin predictable across a year.
Archives, backups and media that only grow
S3-compatible object storage at about UGX 228.16 per GB a month, falling to UGX 195.56 above 1 TB and UGX 162.97 above 5 TB, with transfer in, transfer out and API requests free. A nightly database dump or a growing document archive stays a storage number rather than turning into a bandwidth bill the month somebody restores from it.
Seasonal capacity for a harvest or a term start
Coffee traffic follows the shipping calendar and a university learning platform follows the academic one. Cloud servers are priced per resource per month — UGX 16,150 a vCPU, UGX 11,400 a GB of RAM — so capacity added in September and given back in November costs what those months cost, with no plan change and no migration in either direction.
Every figure excludes VAT; Uganda's 18% is added at checkout. Annual billing is ten months for twelve on eligible plans, and migration planning and assistance are included at no extra charge.
Comparing
What actually changes on the invoice
Against a dollar-priced provider abroad
Compare more than the headline. A dollar bill re-prices itself in shillings every month for reasons that have nothing to do with your usage, so the figure your board approved in one quarter is not the figure that clears in the next — and a twelve-month forecast built on it is a guess. Add the card issuer's margin, add the foreign transaction on the statement, and add the fact that somebody in your organisation has to hold a card capable of paying it at all. Then add the tax and invoicing question: an overseas PDF and a purchase made inside the Ugandan system are not the same document to a URA-facing finance team, and the difference is worth 18% of the spend. Priced in shillings, settled from a Ugandan wallet or bank, the whole column collapses to one number you can plan against.
Against a rack in your own office
The comparison people usually get wrong, because the server looks free once it is bought. It is not. Electricity distribution passed from Umeme to UEDCL on 1 April 2025 and the transition has meant inherited ageing assets, poles due for replacement and load-shedding taken to enable repairs; tariffs are high enough that a diesel generator is standard equipment rather than an emergency purchase. Behind that sit the UPS, the replacement disks, the air conditioning, the person who drives in at 02:00, and the capital already spent on hardware that is depreciating whether it is busy or not. A UGX 310,000 VPS or a UGX 1,151,000 dedicated machine replaces all of it with one fixed shilling line that does not track the diesel price.
From another Ugandan host the price is rarely the argument — it is what the price includes: an API and a CLI rather than a control panel, snapshots and scheduled backups, private networking, independent resize to 32 vCPU and 64 GB, a published 99.9% SLA with automatic service credits, unlimited local traffic, free DDoS filtering, and object storage, dedicated hardware, colocation and three further regions on the same account and the same shilling invoice.