Ubuntu — Kampala's default
Ubuntu VPS Hosting in Uganda
The distribution every guide you follow was already written for.
Ubuntu is what a Kampala developer reaches for at midnight with eleven browser tabs open, what the framework's own deployment page assumes, and what the last contractor left running on the client's server. Deploy 24.04 LTS in ug-1a, paste in your key, and the apt line from the article runs exactly as printed — on a machine in the same city as the people typing into your site, rather than one on the far side of a border and an ocean. From UGX 81,750 a month.
- Ubuntu 24.04 LTS or 22.04 LTS — the image is free on every plan
- Full root, SSH keys and cloud-init on first boot
- Deployed in ug-1a, Kampala, and priced in Uganda Shillings
- MTN Mobile Money, Airtel Money, bank transfer or card
- Resize from 1 to 32 vCPU without changing distribution
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
Where your request goes when the server is in Frankfurt
Uganda has no coastline, so it has no cable landing station. Every byte of international capacity that reaches Kampala has already travelled overland — east through Malaba or Busia to the landing stations at Mombasa, or south through Mutukula toward Dar es Salaam — before it touches salt water at all. That is roughly a thousand kilometres of terrestrial fibre standing between this city and the sea.
Now put your Ubuntu box in Europe, which is what the tutorial's default region quietly does. A customer in Kampala taps a button. The request crosses the country to a border post, runs down through Kenya to Mombasa, goes under an ocean, surfaces in Europe, finds your server — and then makes the entire journey again in reverse before anything appears on the screen. Every uncached page, every form submission, every API call your own front end makes.
Deploy the same image in ug-1a and none of that happens. The request starts in Kampala and ends in Kampala. Ugandan networks exchange traffic with each other in Kampala too — UIXP, the country's internet exchange, has run since 2001 and keeps domestic traffic domestic rather than routing it through a neighbouring country and back. The distro is identical. The geography is not.
19.7 m
Active mobile internet subscriptions (UCC, Q2 2026)
80,257 km
National fibre optic network, June 2026 (UCC)
0
Submarine cable landing stations in Uganda
Paying for it
A shilling price, paid the way Uganda pays
The first server is usually bought by the person who will also be configuring it, on a Saturday, without a company card. Uganda's answer to that is a phone.
MTN Mobile Money and Airtel Money
Both, not one. Uganda is a two-wallet market — the two networks between them carry more than nine in ten mobile subscriptions, and UCC counts about 37.8 million active mobile money users across them. Pick whichever wallet is already in your pocket at checkout and pay for the instance in shillings.
Bank transfer, once there are several boxes
A wallet is the right rail for one 2 GB plan at UGX 81,750 a month. It is the wrong one for an account carrying a production instance, a staging instance and a build runner, which is where Ugandan buyers move to a bank transfer and a single monthly figure their accounts team can reconcile.
Card, when you want it running in ten minutes
Visa and Mastercard both work, and so does the virtual Mastercard MTN issues against a MoMo wallet — useful if you have never held a bank card. No foreign card and no forex conversion is needed either way.
Priced in UGX, not converted at the till
The plan figures are shilling figures: UGX 81,750 for 2 GB, UGX 158,000 for 4 GB, UGX 310,000 for 8 GB. Prices exclude VAT, and Uganda's 18% is calculated at checkout.
Why Ubuntu
Why Ubuntu on Lineserve
Ubuntu LTS pairs five years of security updates with the largest package ecosystem in Linux — and on Lineserve it lands on NVMe hardware in your region, ready the moment it boots.
- The image is free on every plan — you only pay for the server.
- LTS releases get five years of security updates from Canonical.
- Cloud-init runs your setup on first boot — packages, users, and keys, done.
- apt and the Ubuntu ecosystem: almost everything you'll ever install is a package away.
Ubuntu images
Updated regularly
Use cases
What people run on Ubuntu
Web hosting & WordPress
Nginx or Apache with PHP and a database — the classic LAMP/LEMP stack Ubuntu is famous for.
Docker & containers
Ubuntu is the most common Docker host in the world. Install the engine and compose your stack in minutes.
Node.js, Python & Go apps
First-class toolchains via apt and snap; run your API or app server behind a reverse proxy.
PostgreSQL & MySQL
NVMe-backed databases with predictable performance, snapshots before risky migrations.
Dev & staging boxes
Spin up a disposable environment per branch, then snapshot or destroy it when you're done.
VPN & network edge
WireGuard or OpenVPN on a dedicated IPv4 in your region, with a free /64 IPv6 block.
Where the data sits
In Kampala, and provably so
An Ubuntu instance in ug-1a keeps everything it holds in ug-1a: the Postgres data directory, the uploads folder, the nginx logs with your users' addresses in them, the nightly dump you write beside all of it. That is data residency for Uganda's Data Protection and Privacy Act, stated as a place rather than a policy.
It matters more in Uganda than the phrasing suggests. Section 19 of the Act lets personal data leave the country, but it asks the organisation sending it to be able to evidence why that transfer is lawful — and the Personal Data Protection Office has shown it will ask. In July 2025 it ruled against a foreign technology company on exactly that point, along with a failure to register locally. If your users' data never leaves Uganda, that question never arrives at your desk in the first place.
Compliance stays yours: you are the controller, you decide what you collect and why. What changes with the region is the part you would otherwise have to write down, justify and keep on file for an inspection.
Snapshots and scheduled backups of a ug-1a instance are held in the same region as the instance.
Who runs Ubuntu here
What Kampala actually builds on an Ubuntu box
Ubuntu wins this market on the unglamorous argument: it is the version everything else was tested against, and the version the next person you hire has already used.
A Ugandan product's first real server
Node, Django, Laravel or Rails with Postgres beside it and Redis behind that, all on one instance, months before anyone on the team has operations in their job title. The framework's own deployment guide targets Ubuntu, so the founder writing the deploy script on Sunday afternoon is following instructions rather than inventing them.
Mobile money integrations that have to catch a callback
A Kampala fintech reconciling against two collection APIs rather than one, with a webhook endpoint that has to be awake when MTN or Airtel calls it back. Those callbacks originate on Ugandan networks. An endpoint in ug-1a is the shortest thing standing between the operator's request and your database write.
USSD backends for the phones your users actually hold
About twenty million smartphones are connected in Uganda against nearly twenty-five million feature phones and thirteen million basic ones. That mix is why a USSD session menu, not an app, is still how a Ugandan agent network, savings group or agri-payout platform reaches its members — and why the box behind it belongs in the country the session is happening in.
The agency fleet somebody else will inherit
Kampala agencies standardise on Ubuntu less for the kernel than for the handover. Every plugin note, every certificate guide and every LEMP walkthrough assumes it, so a runbook written for one client server reads correctly on the next, and a junior joining in February can follow it without translating anything.
The vendor's docker-compose file
Ugandan businesses increasingly buy self-hosted software — a school management system, a clinic records platform, a point-of-sale backend — and what arrives from the supplier is a compose file tested on Ubuntu. Give it an Ubuntu host and the support conversation stays about the application instead of about your operating system.
Internal tools nobody wants in a foreign subscription
Metabase over the sales database, a Grafana board on the delivery fleet's telemetry, an automation runner wired into the ticketing system. Small Ubuntu boxes with disproportionate convenience — and keeping them in Kampala means the dashboards your team stares at all day are answering from the same city.
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
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is the default image, with 22.04 LTS also available at deploy time — both kept current. You can also bring your own image with a custom ISO.
Yes. All Linux images, Ubuntu included, are free on every plan — the plan price is the full price of the server.
Yes. Every Ubuntu 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. Provide cloud-init user data at deploy and your server bootstraps itself on first boot — packages installed, users created, keys in place before you ever log in.
Yes. Run Ubuntu's standard do-release-upgrade in place, or deploy a fresh 24.04 server and migrate. Either way, snapshot first so you can roll back in a click.
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 one of the better ones. On a small Kampala team the operating system is a staffing decision as much as a technical one: Ubuntu LTS is what the local bootcamps teach, what most CVs list, and what the person covering for you over Christmas will recognise. Debian, Rocky and AlmaLinux are all here too, and all free — choose those when something specific pushes you, not by default.
Yes. Same Ubuntu image, same apt sources, full root and SSH key access, cloud-init on first boot. Not one command changes. What changes is that the machine is in Kampala instead of Virginia, so your users reach it without leaving the country.
Less than most teams expect. UGX 81,750 a month carries a staging environment or a modest site on 2 GB; UGX 158,000 runs a small production application with its database on 4 GB; UGX 310,000 on 8 GB is where a product with real daily traffic tends to settle. You resize between them as the traffic arrives. Prices exclude VAT, and 18% is added at checkout.
On anything a cache cannot serve — the logged-in dashboard, the search box, the checkout — yes. Uganda is landlocked, so a server abroad means every one of those requests is hauled overland to the coast, put under an ocean and brought all the way back. A server in Kampala answers from Kampala.
Both are supported, alongside bank transfer and card, and everything is priced in Uganda Shillings. The Ubuntu image itself costs nothing — the plan price is the whole price of the server.
Often yes, with a caveat worth being honest about. Put the origin where your data, your team and your admin sessions are, and put a CDN in front of it for the static assets your overseas visitors pull. That gives you a Ugandan origin you control and cached delivery everywhere else, which is the correct shape for a tour operator or an exporter selling abroad.
It can be, and an LTS release gives you years of security updates to do it with. But if the box is one you intend to configure once and leave alone, read our Debian page; if a software vendor has written Red Hat Enterprise Linux into your support matrix, read the Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux pages. All of those images are free on the same plans.
Yes. A Lineserve instance in ug-1a comes with a dedicated IPv4 address and a /64 IPv6 block, so any domain you hold — .ug, .co.ug, .com or anything else — points at it with an ordinary A or AAAA record at your registrar.
Yes. The same Ubuntu images deploy into ke-1a, tz-1a and ng-1a from the same account, so the cloud-init user data and the deploy script you wrote for Kampala carry across unchanged, and each market's traffic is served from its own region.
In the same region as the instance. On-demand snapshots and scheduled automated backups are available on every plan, and for a ug-1a instance both stay in Kampala — which is usually the point of choosing the region in the first place.
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 Ubuntu 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.