Rocky Linux — when the contract says RHEL
Rocky Linux VPS Hosting in Uganda
The distribution you pick because a support matrix told you to.
Somewhere in the documentation of the core banking system, the insurance platform or the hospital information system your institution has just bought, a line reads Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9. Rocky 9 is built from the same sources to be compatible with it, carries a ten-year lifecycle, and costs nothing on top of the plan. Deploy it in ug-1a and the vendor's installer finds precisely what it was written to expect — in Kampala, where the people using it are.
- Rocky Linux 9 — RHEL 9 compatible, free on every plan
- A ten-year lifecycle: patch through the contract, not inside it
- SELinux enforcing by default, dnf and firewalld as documented
- Deployed in ug-1a, Kampala · data residency for Uganda's Data Protection and Privacy Act
- Billed in Uganda Shillings · 99.9% uptime SLA
No credit card required · Billed in UGX
Pricing
Simple plans, billed in your currency
Pay in local currency — no cards, no forex surprises. Every plan is full root, full network, no throttling. Annual billing gets you two months free.
Linux VPS – 2 GB RAM
Small workloads and personal projects.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 1 vCPU
- 2 GB RAM
- 40 GB SSD
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
Linux VPS – 4 GB RAM
Web servers and small databases.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 2 vCPU
- 4 GB RAM
- 80 GB SSD
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
Linux VPS – 8 GB RAM
Production web applications.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 4 vCPU
- 8 GB RAM
- 160 GB SSD
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
Linux VPS – 16 GB RAM
High-traffic applications.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 8 vCPU
- 16 GB RAM
- 320 GB SSD
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
Linux VPS – 32 GB RAM
Enterprise applications.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 16 vCPU
- 32 GB RAM
- 640 GB SSD
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
Linux VPS – 64 GB RAM
Massive workloads and consolidation.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 32 vCPU
- 64 GB RAM
- 1280 GB SSD
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
Prices exclude VAT. Local currency figures are indicative and settled at checkout. Need more cores or memory? Talk to Sales.
Weighing up Windows too? Compare all Linux & Windows plans on the VPS Hosting page.
The network
Every teller screen is a round trip
Systems chosen by procurement are used by people at counters. A cashier in Mbarara posts a transaction. A loans officer in Jinja pulls a member's history. A branch in Gulu runs the end-of-day. Each of those is a small, synchronous request that somebody is physically waiting on, and there are thousands of them in a working day.
Uganda is landlocked. There is no cable landing station in the country, so international capacity arrives overland — through Malaba or Busia toward the Mombasa landings, or through Mutukula toward Dar es Salaam — before it ever reaches the sea. Host that core system in Europe and the branch network in Uganda is reaching it across roughly a thousand kilometres of terrestrial fibre plus an ocean, in both directions, for every screen refresh. Host it in ug-1a and the request never leaves the country.
The resilience question a supervised institution's risk committee asks is a different one, and it deserves a straight answer. Uganda's international capacity is no longer a single road: there is a Kampala–Malaba corridor along the railway toward Mombasa, a Nairobi–Kisumu–Kampala route crossing at both Malaba and Busia, a Goma–Kigali–Kampala–Mombasa path, and the national backbone's own crossing at Mutukula. That diversity is real and it has improved markedly in a decade. It is also beside the point for domestic traffic, which is exactly the argument for putting the origin here.
What the branch depends on
An in-country origin narrows the dependency list. A Kampala user reaching a Kampala server depends on their own access network and on domestic infrastructure. The same user reaching a European server also depends on a border crossing, a transit corridor through a neighbouring country, and a subsea system shared by half the region.
Four regions, one account
Rocky 9 deploys identically into ke-1a in Nairobi, tz-1a in Dar es Salaam and ng-1a in Lagos. For a Ugandan institution with a Kenyan subsidiary, or a services contractor working the pipeline corridor into Tanzania, that is a genuine multi-region deployment rather than a manufactured one.
Why Rocky Linux
Why Rocky Linux on Lineserve
Founded by CentOS's original creator after CentOS Linux was discontinued, Rocky rebuilds RHEL for everyone — enterprise-grade Linux with a ten-year lifecycle, free.
- Bug-for-bug compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
- The natural home for workloads that used to run on CentOS.
- Ten-year lifecycle per major release — patch, don't migrate.
- The image is free on every plan — you only pay for the server.
Rocky Linux images
Updated regularly
Use cases
What people run on Rocky Linux
CentOS replacements
Move workloads off end-of-life CentOS onto the distro built to take its place.
Enterprise applications
Anything certified or documented for RHEL 9 runs the same here — without the subscription.
Java & backend services
Long-supported base for JVM apps and services that outlive release cycles.
Databases
PostgreSQL, MySQL or MariaDB on NVMe, with SELinux enforcing by default.
SELinux-hardened workloads
Security-first deployments that lean on the RHEL family's hardening story.
Infrastructure services
FreeIPA, monitoring stacks, and the glue services enterprise networks run on.
Where the data sits
A location your supervisor can point at
A Rocky instance in ug-1a holds its data in Kampala: the database files, the transaction logs, the document store and any backup written beside them. That is data residency for Uganda's Data Protection and Privacy Act, and for the institutions on this page it is usually the first question in the room rather than the last.
Uganda's regime is stricter in practice than the statute reads. Section 19 permits personal data to be transferred out of the country, but the organisation doing it has to be able to evidence the lawful basis and keep the records available for inspection — there is no per-transfer permit to obtain, and equally no blanket corporate privacy policy that will do the job. The Personal Data Protection Office has already ruled against a foreign company for failing to evidence exactly that, alongside a failure to register locally.
Financial institutions carry a second layer. The Bank of Uganda's Cyber and Technology Risk Management Guidelines have bound supervised institutions since 1 December 2024, which puts technology risk governance and infrastructure into the supervisory conversation rather than leaving it to the IT department. Knowing, and being able to show, where a system physically runs is the least any of that requires. Compliance remains the institution's; the region is the part we supply.
Talk to sales if your risk or procurement team needs a written description of the deployment for a board or supervisory file.
Who runs here
The Ugandan systems that specify Red Hat
This is the corner of the market where the operating system is chosen by a procurement document rather than by the person typing.
Core banking and member management
The Linux tier under a core system at a bank, a microfinance deposit-taking institution or a large SACCO — application servers, batch jobs, the month-end and dividend runs — where the vendor supports one distribution family and the institution has neither the appetite nor the mandate to argue about it. Ten years of lifecycle means you patch through a five-year contract rather than re-platform in the middle of one.
Tier 4 lenders and the UMRA-supervised estate
Uganda's Tier 4 sector — SACCOs, non-deposit-taking microfinance institutions and money lenders licensed by the Uganda Microfinance Regulatory Authority — is broad and small-institution-heavy. The systems underneath it are loan books, member portals, agent-banking backends and reconciliation against two mobile money providers, and they end up on a hardened enterprise base because that is what the platform vendor ships and supports.
Insurance, health and the platforms that hold identity documents
Policy administration, claims workflow, hospital information systems and the document stores full of national identity cards that sit behind all of them. SELinux enforcing by default, a conservative change process and a distribution the vendor recognises are the reasons these deployments look the way they do.
JVM services built to outlive their release cycle
Spring, Tomcat, Kafka and the integration layer behind a Ugandan insurer, aggregator or logistics platform. These stacks get certified once and are then expected to run untouched for years, which is an argument for a base whose major version is still supported when the certification comes up for renewal.
Albertine oil-services contractors
Not the international operators, who host globally, but the Ugandan firms around them: local-content and contractor management systems, HSE and incident reporting, document control, procurement and tender portals for companies working out of Hoima, Buliisa and Kikuube and headquartered in Kampala. This software is bought with a support matrix attached, and the matrix usually names Red Hat.
Fleet telematics and site-to-Kampala aggregation
GPS and equipment telemetry arriving continuously from vehicles and remote sites over constrained links, landing in a time-series database that someone in Kampala queries all afternoon. An in-country collector is the difference between an ingest path that stays in Uganda and one that leaves the country twice before the data is stored.
Regions
Kampala is home. The other three are a border you choose to cross.
Deploy in ug-1a and the machine is in Kampala, in the country its users are already standing in. The region is chosen per instance rather than per account, so nothing about this decision is permanent or global: a production database in Kampala, a build runner wherever is convenient, a backup target somewhere else entirely, all on the same key and the same API.
The other three are Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and Lagos, on that same account, the same API and the same shilling invoice. Here is where a Ugandan buyer has to read the map differently from everyone else on it. For a business in Nairobi, ke-1a is home. For you it is abroad twice over: a copy of Ugandan personal data held there is a transfer out of Uganda that belongs in your section 19 record, and a request served from there still crosses the border at Malaba or Busia before it reaches your customer. Regional is not the same word as local, and Uganda is the market where the difference is easiest to see.
That said, the corridor is real and some businesses genuinely live on it. Trade moves between Kampala, Kisumu, Nairobi and Mombasa; the crude pipeline out of the Albertine region runs 1,443 km to Tanga on the Tanzanian coast; freight, agri-export, logistics and contracting firms bill customers in three countries. When your operation is actually in two markets, tz-1a or ke-1a stops being a distant region and becomes the second half of your own footprint. And when what you want is somewhere to put a standby, a replica or an offsite copy, another region on the same account is a configuration change rather than a second supplier to onboard.
Uganda
Kampala
~3 ms
typical, within metro · Data stays in Uganda
Kenya
Nairobi
~2 ms
typical, within metro · Data stays in Kenya
Tanzania
Dar es Salaam
~6 ms
typical, within metro · Data stays in Tanzania
Nigeria
Lagos
~4 ms
typical, within metro · Data stays in Nigeria
Uptime SLA
99.9%
- DDoS filtering is included, and so is the traffic
- Service credits applied automatically when we miss the SLA
- Measured monthly, per region, on network and power availability
Support
East Africa Time all year, and a queue that already knows Uganda
Two channels with two different jobs. A signed-in ticket arrives already carrying the account, the region and the instance, so the first reply is about the fault rather than about which machine you meant. [email protected] is the commercial door: a quotation against a purchase order, transfer details ahead of a payment run rather than during it, a billing account configured with your TIN and registered name before the first invoice, and the SLA terms and credit process in writing while you are still choosing.
Ahead of both sits status.lineserve.net. A region-wide event is published there while a reply is still being typed, and thirty seconds on it turns "the site is down" into "my instance is unreachable and the status page is clear" — a different ticket, and a far shorter one.
What that ticket should carry, in the order it is read: the region and the instance, the EAT time the behaviour started, the last thing that changed before it, the actual error text rather than a description of it, and whether it reproduces from more than one Ugandan network. That last one carries more weight here than almost anywhere. Uganda is a two-operator market, and an MTN handset, an Airtel handset and an office fibre line disagreeing about your service is a completely different fault from all three failing together — it is worth thirty seconds of your time and it can save an hour of everyone's.
Uganda runs on East Africa Time, UTC+3, and has never observed daylight saving, so a change window agreed in EAT means the same thing in January and in July. You share that clock exactly with Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and sit two hours ahead of Lagos, which matters when you are scheduling work across regions. The Ugandan commercial day generally runs 08:00 to 17:00, Monday to Friday. One scheduling detail that catches people out: a Ugandan public holiday falling on a weekend stays on that date rather than moving to the Monday, so the calendar is not the same shape as some of its neighbours'.
The last part of local support is vocabulary rather than hours. The person reading your ticket knows what an operator collections callback is and why it retries, knows what the border crossing at Malaba has to do with the traceroute you are staring at, and knows why your finance office wants a TIN on the document before the first billing run. None of that has to be explained before the actual problem can be. Buy from somewhere that has never sold into Uganda and the first twenty minutes of every serious ticket go on describing the country.
Sales
[email protected]FAQ
Questions, answered
Yes — Rocky Linux is built from the same sources to be bug-for-bug compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Software documented or certified for RHEL 9 runs identically on Rocky 9.
That's exactly what Rocky was created for, by one of CentOS's original founders. dnf, systemd, SELinux and the file layout all work the way your CentOS runbooks expect.
Rocky Linux 9 is available at deploy time and kept current. You can also bring your own image with a custom ISO.
Yes. All Linux images, Rocky included, are free on every plan — the plan price is the full price of the server.
Yes. Every Rocky Linux VPS gives you complete root access and SSH key authentication from the moment it boots. It's your server to configure however you like.
Yes. Resize to a larger plan as your workload grows, with minimal downtime. Compute and storage scale together across the tiers.
Every plan supports on-demand snapshots and scheduled automated backups. Snapshot storage is billed per GB beyond your included allowance.
It is a conversation, and it is usually a short one. Rocky 9 is built from the same sources to be binary compatible with RHEL 9, so installers, dependencies and package names behave identically, and a large share of vendors accept it. Where a contract genuinely requires a Red Hat subscription, Rocky is still the right base to prove the deployment on before that subscription is bought.
By who is asking. Rocky is where regulated and vendor-driven deployments in Uganda tend to land; AlmaLinux is where hosting estates land, because it is what the control panels support. Both are RHEL 9 compatible, both are free on every plan, and both deploy into ug-1a from the same account, so the decision is reversible in an afternoon.
It buys you the ability to keep a certified system patched for the whole life of the contract it was certified under. A core system procured this year on a five-year term will still be receiving updates when the term ends and again when it renews, which means security patching is a routine task rather than a re-platforming project with a business case attached.
It varies more than any other workload we sell, which is why it is worth sizing rather than guessing. A 16 GB plan at UGX 615,000 a month carries a good deal; a 32 GB plan is UGX 1,224,000 and a 64 GB plan is UGX 2,443,000. Where the database needs dedicated hardware, the LineServe Core line is quoted with a one-time setup fee alongside the monthly price. Prices exclude VAT, and 18% is added at checkout.
Yes. Every instance has a dedicated public IPv4 address and full root over SSH, so you can give an implementation engineer access, watch the install, and rotate the credentials when they are finished. The instance stays in your account and in ug-1a throughout.
On the instance's own volume in ug-1a, in Kampala. So do the snapshots and the scheduled backups, which is the part a risk committee usually asks about second — a backup copy sitting in another country would undo most of the argument for the region.
No. Compliance belongs to you: what you collect, why, on what lawful basis, and how you handle a breach. What the region gives you is residency — the personal data your institution holds stays in Uganda, so the section 19 cross-border transfer question does not arise for it, and the location you would have to declare is a Ugandan one.
Nearly always by bank transfer, in shillings, against a monthly figure that reconciles as a single line. MTN Mobile Money, Airtel Money and card are all available too, and they suit the smaller instances and top-ups rather than a core system's monthly bill.
Yes, and it is ordinary practice rather than an exotic architecture. The same Rocky 9 image deploys into ke-1a, tz-1a and ng-1a, so a Kampala primary can replicate to a standby in Nairobi or Dar es Salaam on the same account. Where your supervisor has views about where a recovery copy may sit, get those views first — the technical side is the easy part.
For a vendor-driven or regulated system, usually yes — the runbooks, the SELinux policy and the service names carry over intact. Our CentOS page walks through how Ugandan estates stage that move, including running the old and new servers side by side before the cutover.
Yes, a 99.9% uptime SLA, with on-demand snapshots and scheduled backups available on every plan. For a system a branch network logs into all day, that commitment is usually what wins the argument against the rack in the head-office server room.
Yes. Your data is hosted in Uganda and stays in-country, giving you data residency for Uganda's Data Protection and Privacy Act. It isn't moved out of Uganda without your instruction.
In our Kampala data centre (ug-1a). Your content is stored and served from Kampala, close to your users.
Pay in Uganda Shillings using MTN Mobile Money, Airtel Money, bank transfer, or card. No foreign card or forex conversion is required.
You're billed in UGX. Prices can be viewed in USD, KES, TZS, or NGN, but as a Uganda customer you pay in UGX with no forex conversion.
Deploy your Rocky Linux VPS in under 60 seconds
Full root, running close to your users. Pay in local currency, with no card required to start.
No credit card required · 99.9% uptime SLA · Billed in UGX
Related products
Every plan below runs in the same three regions, on the same network, billed the same way.